The WHO is complicit in China’s Winter Olympics smokescreen
Matt Ridley
Will Dr Tedros use the Beijing Games to deliver some home truths to China? Probably not My article for the Telegraph: The news that Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organisation, is to attend the Winter Olympics in Beijing is baffling on a number of levels. Has he not got a day […]
I was duped by the Covid lab leak deniers
Matt Ridley
That senior scientists saw evidence for theories that they trashed in public has shattered trust in science My article for the Telegraph: Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases […]
Britain’s hubristic green commissars can’t see the wood for the trees
Matt Ridley
Storm Arwen showed the value of gas stoves and diesel, and the folly of our national forestry policy My article for the Telegraph: The one thing that cheered us Northumbrians up as we waited for power to come back on after Storm Arwen (some wit points out that naming these daughters of Boreas only seems […]
The Government is still fighting the wrong war on Covid-19
Matt Ridley
Their hasty over-reaction to the arrival of a new variant reflects just how little we truly understand this virus My article for the Telegraph: Here we go again, fighting the last war. Because governments are perceived to have moved too slowly to ban flights when the delta variant arose in India, we jumped into action […]
It’s a danger to the world that the precise origin of Covid-19 remains a mystery
Matt Ridley
Until we can rule out a laboratory origin for Covid, we must act as if it may have happened My article for the Telegraph: It is almost exactly two years since the pandemic began. According to an official document seen by the South China Morning Post, the first retrospectively diagnosed case of Covid in Wuhan […]
We’re wasting our big Brexit gene-editing opportunity
Matt Ridley
The Government’s half-hearted support for the process is denying us a huge chance to progress My article, for The Telegraph: The Government wants to unleash innovation. If it were to be presented with a magic wand that could by 2040 feed millions more people, avoid tens of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions and […]
The radical potential of nuclear fusion exposes the folly of our net zero deadline
Matt Ridley
Future technology that could power a city with a device the size of a shipping container may prove a better bet than harnessing the wind My article for Telegraph: In a key milestone on the road to harnessing fusion power, Lawrence Livermore laboratory announced this week that it had extracted energy from an object the […]
Environmentalists have got it wrong – we’re not facing an insect apocalypse
Matt Ridley
The doomsday claims are not backed up by scientific research My article for the Telegraph: On Twitter this week an unfortunate hiker showed a short video of the midges swarming in their tens of thousands over his backpack and his arms in the Scottish Highlands. It was itchy just to watch. It would be silly […]
Life science is taking off in the age of the gene
Matt Ridley
The ‘great stagnation’ is a myth; wonders are being accomplished. But silly rules still block progress. My article for the Telegraph: Back in the early 1950s scientists were baffled by one aspect of life itself. Our cells were full of proteins whose properties depended on their precise shapes, and the key feature of life was […]
Flawed modelling is condemning Britain to lockdown
Matt Ridley
Again and again, worst-case scenarios are presented with absurd precision, and the problem goes further than Britain’s slow reopening My article for The Telegraph: Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation. A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to a profession that has […]
