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Matt Ridley
An attack that confirms the accuracy of my lecture I have sent the following letter to the president of the Royal Society and the Chairman and director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in response to a highly misleading letter to me that was copied to them. To Sir Venki Ramakrishnan FRS, Lord Lawson […]
Global greening versus global warming
Matt Ridley
The 2016 Global Warming Policy Foundation Lecture The text of a lecture given at the Royal Society on 17 October 2016: (Note some minor corrections made subsequent to delivery. These are shown in italics.) I am a passionate champion of science. I have devoted most of my career to celebrating and chronicling scientific discovery. […]
Matt Ridley
A lecture on the grim history of Malthusian policies I gave a lecture recently at Haileybury College (the successor to the East India College where the economist Robert Malthus taught), on the topic of “The Misapplication of Malthus”. It was based on a chapter of my book The Evolution of Everything: Parson Malthus casts a […]
Britain’s chance to be the global champion of free trade
Matt Ridley
UK to trigger Brexit 200 years after Ricardo’s comparative advantage My Times column on free trade after Brexit: The prime minister wants Britain to be “the most passionate, most consistent, most convincing advocate for free trade”. Under either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and with world trade stagnating, it looks as if the job is […]
Mental illness is the greatest research challenge
Matt Ridley
Infectious and heart disease are in retreat; cancer won’t go away My Times column on the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative in basic medical science: Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, and his wife Priscilla Chan, a paediatrician, have announced their intention to spend $3 billion over ten years on medical research. Having met them last year, […]
Junk science on statins, snus and vaping
Matt Ridley
Evidence, not authority, is what should determine policy My Times column on statins, snus and vaping: One of the most salutary examples of people in authority getting risks wrong is a paper written in 1955 by the first head of the environmental cancer section of the US National Cancer Institute, Wilhelm Hueper. The title was […]
Matt Ridley
Introduced species are the biggest cause of extinction – but not all bad My essay on invasive species in the Wall Street Journal: In July, the New Zealand government announced its intention to eradicate all rats, stoats and possums from the entire country by 2050 to save native birds such as the kiwi. It’s an […]
An ice-free Arctic Ocean has happened before
Matt Ridley
When the Arctic loses all its sea ice one summer, will it matter? My Times column on how the Arctic sea ice has melted in late summer before, between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago: The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is approaching its annual nadir. By early September each year about two thirds […]
Whatever happened to Adam Smith?
Matt Ridley
Economic libertarianism is no longer on offer to American voters My Times column on economic libertarianism: Last week both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump set out their economic policies in set-piece speeches. Mr Trump’s, delivered in Detroit, so far as one could tell from the fractured syntax and the digressions into invective, involves a trade […]
Getting the rich to pay for conservation
Matt Ridley
Hunting in Africa and Durham bring spectacular benefits for wildlife My Spectator article on the similarity between trophy hunting in Africa and grouse shooting in Durham. Both have huge benefits for non-target species of wildlife. The vast Bubye Valley Conservancy in southern Zimbabwe is slightly larger than County Durham, as well as much hotter […]
