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My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: A recent paper in the journal Nature concluded that species extinction caused by habitat loss is happening less than half as fast as usually estimated. The normal method for calculating rates of extinction assumes that doomed species merely cling temporarily to a shrunken patch of habitat, […]

I sent this letter to the Financial Times: Sir, Gideon Rachman (“In defence of gloomy columnists“, May 24) is right to point out that terrible blips will still happen in an improving world. Another way of making the same point is that good news tends to be gradual, incremental and barely visible, while bad news almost […]

Forests are self-replenishing but easily exhausted; fossil fuels are the opposite My latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal:     What does the word “renewable” mean? Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a thousand-page report on the future of renewable energy, which it defined as solar, hydro, wind, tidal, […]

Warmiong potential of methane emissions from gas do not nearly match carbon dioxide emissions from coal It turns out I was right to be sceptical about the Howarth study claiming that shale gas production produces more greenhouse gases than coal. Ther’s now a definitive study here thoroughly debunking Howarth and showing that shale gas results in […]

Britain’s neo-medieval green policy robs the poor to pay the rich I have this article in the current issue of the Spectator (not yet online): `Greener food and greener fuel’ is the promise of Ensus, a firm that opened Europe’s largest (£250 million) bio-ethanol plant at Wilton on Teesside last year – and has now […]

Sean Corrigan’s superb essay on finite resources Now this is what I call magnificent writing in the sprit of Swift: Sean Corrigan riffs on peak oil, finite resources and the planet’s carrying capacity: It is much better to forget all that Sierra Club/WWF elitist, anti-mankind, horse manure about ‘the call on the planet’ exerted by us […]

In praise of the Green Revolution Here’s a piece I wrote for a Times supplement published yesterday in print, not available online. In the twentieth century, the world population quadrupled. By the 1960s, it was growing at 2% a year. Yet, unlike the nineteenth century when the prairies, pampas and steppes had been brought under […]

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal, with added links: It’s presumably neither ethical nor practical, but supposing that somebody could sequence Osama bin Laden’s genome, which genes would you want to examine to try to understand his violent desires? I put this question to the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, the author […]

Random thoughts on gas, songs, weather, walls and dead flies I wrote this week’s Spectator diary (no link yet): A day in London for the launch of my new report `The Shale Gas Shock’, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I argue that shale gas calls the bluff of the renewable energy movement in […]

I stumbled on a BBC television program this evening (watch it here), which was unintentionally revealing. It was a compilation of extracts over several decades from its flagship science series `Horizon’, all on the theme of the `end of the world’. The episodes covered asteroids, supervolcanoes, contagious earthquakes, bird flu, the Y2K computer bug, the greenhouse […]