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Whenever somebody gets nostalgic about the past, I get suspicious. In the eigth century BC, Hesiod was already moaning about how things aint like they used to be. The Wall Street Journal has a great article about how nostalgic people get for the way air travel used to be in the 1950s — with more leg […]

I have long known that there is nothing remotely `green’ about putting wind farms all over the countryside, with their eagle-slicing, bat-popping, subsidy-eating, rare-earth-demanding, steel-rich, intermittent-output characteristics. But until I read Robert Bryce’s superb and sober new book Power Hungry, I had not realised just how dreadfully bad for the environment nearly all renewable energy is. […]

On the use of straw men in scientific arguments I found this on John Hawks’s anthropology blog. He’s writing about the sometimes heated debate over whether Homo floresiensis is a species or a deformity: What I notice is that when I write about this, I have to correct a lot of false claims about what the […]

Scepticism about economic growth is a reactionary, not a radical philosophy Daniel Ben-Ami’s new book `Ferraris For All‘, published by the Policy Press, is a great read. Ben-Ami’s point is to defend the idea of economic development against the `growth sceptics’ who have emerged in various blue, green and red guises recently. What he does […]

What happens after oil spills I have written an op-ed article in The Times today. It’s behind a paywall, but here’s my last draft before editing by the newspaper, together with links. So long as the cap holds, and assuming that is the end of it, the Deepwater Horizon spill (up to 600,000 tonnes in […]

Today at TED Global in Oxford, among other great talks, I was blown away by this graph, shown by David McCandless.     It shows the media mentions of scares, all of them false alarms. Notice the huge peaks for swine flu and bird flu. Notice how video game fears peak twice a year, once in […]

Matt’s TEDGlobal talk in Oxford My TED talk is now live online. At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It’s not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective […]

Remember who needs to persuade who on climate change I have just one comment on the Climategate reports and that is this. People who ask the world to spend $45 trillion on a project are surely under an obligation to show their raw data and their workings. If instead, they publish only `adjusted data’ rather than […]

Ten reasons I want the Netherlands to win the World Cup Ten reasons I want the Netherlands to win the World Cup 1. More than almost any nation since the Phoenicians, the Dutch traded rather than plundered their way to prosperity in their Golden Age. 2. They were cheated out of winning (hosting?) the industrial […]

Rational Optimism reaches the tabloids I am in today’s Sun newspaper. Fully clothed. WHEN I was growing up in the 1970s we were warned the ice age was returning, the population explosion was unstoppable and we’d all be poisoned by chemicals in the environment. None of these things happened. In fact, all the trends went in […]