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Norman Macrae 1923-2010 When I joined the Economist in 1983, Norman Macrae was the deputy editor. He died last week at the age of 87. Soon after I joined the staff, a thing called a computer terminal appeared on my desk and my electric typewriter disappeared. Around that time, Norman wrote a long article that […]

An attack on my book that gets it wrong Update: now that I have seen the five scientists’ comments, I find that remarkably they support and vindicate each one of my factual statements. I have posted a detailed analysis in  a separate blog post. Here’s a letter I just sent to New Scientist: In her […]

Forbidden fruit is tempting I just read a wonderful book Hybrid: the history and science of plant breeding by Noel Kingsbury. It contains a charming story, of a Moravian priest called Father Schreiber, who was more interested in horticulture than holiness, and whose parish included Gregor Mendel’s birthplace, Hyncice. As Kingsbury tells the tale: Schreiber also […]

Why are governments so keen on increasing the human footprint in the name of the environment? I have written a longish piece about the human footprint on the earth, avaliable as a `ChangeThis’ manifesto here Here are a few extracts:   I am going to argue that the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking […]

George Monbiot’s attack on me in the Guardian is very misleading George Monbiot’s recent attack on me in the Guardian is misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much more balanced than Monbiot’s selective quotations imply. I argue that the state’s role in sometimes impeding or destroying the process that […]

Jonathon Porritt versus Jonathan Dimbleby In my book I quote the English environmentalist Jonathon Porritt as follows: ‘It’s blindingly obvious [that] completely unsustainable population growth in most of Africa will keep it permanently, hopelessly, stuck in deepest, darkest poverty.’ At first I had assumed that the quote, which I had found in another book, must […]

Average incomes of the poor now exceed those of the rich 50 years ago. In my book I point out that an unemployed British father of three on welfare today receives more in state support than a man on the average wage received in income in 1957. It’s an eye-catching reminder of how wrong J […]

Caution should be applied to predictions as well as to risks Tim Black has an excellent article in Spiked about the hypercautious European reaction to the Icelandic volcano in April: We have since discovered that the maximum density of ash (100 micrograms of ash per cubic metre) over the UK during the ban was one […]

Canadian style The Globe and Mail (Toronto) has made a nice new version of my “handaxe and mouse” image to illustrate their review of The Rational Optimist  

Around 7,000 years ago it was much, much warmer all around the globe. There’s a lot of debate about the `Medieval Warm Period’. But I’ve always been intrigued by the warm period of 7,000 years ago, known as the Holocene Optimum, and I have been doing some digging to find out just how warm it […]