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Matt Ridley
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 […]
Matt Ridley
Green politicking can do real harm Tim Worstall has a superb rebuke to the idiotic argument that greedy speculation, rather than greenie politicking, was the real cause of the high food prices, hunger and food riots of 2008: In short, futures allow speculation upon the future: which is why we have them, for speculation upon the […]
Matt Ridley
Previous declarations of scientific consensus have often proved wrong Update: apologies for formatting problems in a previous version of this blog post. Last week a study claimed that 97-98 percent of the most published climate scientists agree with the scientific consensus that man-made climate change is happening. Well, duh. Of course they would: it’s their livelihood. […]
Matt Ridley
Where are the pressure groups for good news? have written a blog at the Huffington Post called Down with Doom. Here’s an extract: I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in telling the good news? They do not […]
Matt Ridley
A well timed lightning bolt I was giving a talk in Bozeman, Montana, last night at an event to celebrate the 30th anniversary ofPERC, a think tank that encourages private approaches to wildlife conservation and free-market environmental solutions. Just as I uttered the words “of course, things will still go wrong”, there was a huge […]
Matt Ridley
Ardipithecus is too interesting to fight over I spent an afternoon this week getting a personal tour of a cast of the skeleton of Ardipithecus from Tim White, the leader of the team that decsribed it. Call me a nerd, but I found it spine-tingling to hold in my hands the skull of a 4.4.million […]
Matt Ridley
A journalism prize to celebrate Frederic Bastiat Frederic Bastiat’s writings are full of brilliant rebukes against the restriction of trade, and the curtailment of human happiness such restrictions always bring. But it is in a discussion around the state funding of the arts that Bastiat most clearly articulates the pessimism behind the bureaucratic state and the […]
Matt Ridley
Did war prevent the invention of trade in other species? Nick Wade has a good piece in today’s New York Times about John Mitani’s chronicling of warfare between troops of Chimpanzees in Uganda. Dr. Mitani’s team has now put a full picture together by following chimps on their patrols, witnessing 18 fatal attacks over 10 years […]
More evidence of just how ‘greatly exaggerated’ the ocean acidification scare is
Matt Ridley
Natural variations in ocean pH both in time and space dwarf human-induced trends. Pertinent to my recent response to New Scientist on ocean acidification, Willis Eschenbach has a fascinating piece at Wattsupwiththat on a study of ocean pH along a transect from Hawaii to Alaska. Turns out that the further north you go, the less alkaline the ocean: […]
The threat from ocean acidification is greatly exaggerated
Matt Ridley
Corals under threat? Yes, but not much from either warming or acidification. As part of an `interview’ with me, New Scientist published a critique by five scientists of two pages of my book The Rational Optimist. Despite its tone, this critique only confirms the accuracy of each of the statements in this section of the book. […]
