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Sad news of the death of John McCarthy, former professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, who coined the very term “artificial intelligence” in 1955 and invented the LISP programming language in 1958. McCarthy was a true “progressive” in that he appreciated the rapid and dramatic improvements in human living standards brought about by innovation. […]

Bronwen Maddox, editor of Prospect, has a long article entitled “Just Too Many?”, arguing that the world needs to end its taboo on discussing population and population control. This is of course pegged on the United Nations’ somewhat gimmicky announcement that the world will pass seven billion people on 31st October. Thugh it is generally a […]

he Australian has published my review of Donna Laframboise’s book here. The review prompted a tweet from Michael Mann that I was wrong to say the IPCC had dropped the hockey stick. Here’s a source: judge for yourself. Here’s the text of the review: A LITTLE-KNOWN Canadian freelancer whowrites a short book dense with data and argument, […]

Chris Huhne, the UK energy secretary, boasts that wind farms and other renewable energy schemes will create 9,000 jobs this year. Since they are all subsidised, each one is in effect sponsored by a newly unemployed person elsewhere in the economy. Shale gas already supports 140,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone, up from about zero in […]

From The Economist comes news that does not surprise me and reinforces my view, aired in mydebate with Bill Gates, that pessimism about Africa is overdone and trade is transforming Africa for the better: AFRICA has made a phenomenal leap in the last decade. Its economy is growing faster than that of any other continent. Foreign […]

Nicely put by Michael Barone: …A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists. They have an unshakeable faith that manmade carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate, causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will […]

Here is a letter I sent to the editor and deputy editor of The Economist.   A comment on the piece by James Astill about the Berkeley temperature study. Most of the article is a sensible discussion of a deadly dull piece of statistics that changes nothing. But it’s topped and tailed with claims that this leaves […]

Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is the extraordinary story of modern chicken genetics. Of all the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals in the world, the most abundant species is probably the chicken. At any one time, approximately 20 billion cocks and hens are alive on the planet (though never for long). […]

Donna Laframboise is a journalist and civil libertarian in Toronto, who made her name as a fearless investigative reporter in the 1990s. She has recently been investigating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has come up with startling results about how its reports are compiled. For those of us who took the IPCC’s evaluations […]

Here’s my latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal:   Writing about science carries the risk of embarrassment. If you champion a theory and it gets disproved, you have some explaining to do. So it is nice when a theory you choose does win the race.   In the early 1990s I wrote […]