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Ten reasons campaign rhetoric will not be the same as reality My Times column on Trump’s electoral triumph (originally published 14 November): Years of compensating for the media’s tendency to look on the dark side of everything has taught me that it generally pays to seek silver linings. It’s possible of course that Donald Trump […]

Why collective guesses outperform experts in certain decisions My Times column on the wisdom of crowds, published the day before election day in the US: ‘In these democratic days, any investigation into the trustworthiness and peculiarities of popular judgments is of interest.” So begins an article entitled Vox Populi, which is not about Donald Trump […]

Why wolves are increasing, lions decreasing and tigers holding steady? My Times column on the surprising correlation between prosperity and improving conservation outcomes: As foxes move into cities and deer, badgers and otters grow ever-more numerous, along with birds such as ospreys, buzzards and red kites, you might be thinking much of Britain’s wildlife is […]

The scale and cost of battery storage for grid power would be huge My Times column on batteries:   Batteries are no longer boring. Whether catching fire in Samsung Note 7s, being hailed as the answer to future electricity grids thanks to breakthrough chemical innovation, or being manufactured on a gigantic scale in Elon Musk’s […]

Polls show the public welcomes skilled migrants such as scientists My recent Times column from 10 October on immigration and the European Union: Michael Kosterlitz, one of the four British-born but American-resident winners of Nobel prizes in science this year, is so incensed by Brexit that he is considering renouncing his British citizenship: “The idea […]

Protesters, lawyers and public servants make money from delay My recent Times column on the planning paralysis holding back Britain: At last, the government is about to decide on a third runway at Heathrow airport — by the end of this month, I hear. It’s only been ten years since Tony Blair’s government first proposed […]

An attack that confirms the accuracy of my lecture I have sent the following letter to the president of the Royal Society and the Chairman and director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in response to a highly misleading letter to me that was copied to them.   To Sir Venki Ramakrishnan FRS, Lord Lawson […]

The 2016 Global Warming Policy Foundation Lecture The text of a lecture given at the Royal Society on 17 October 2016: (Note some minor corrections made subsequent to delivery. These are shown in italics.)   I am a passionate champion of science. I have devoted most of my career to celebrating and chronicling scientific discovery. […]

A lecture on the grim history of Malthusian policies I gave a lecture recently at Haileybury College (the successor to the East India College where the economist Robert Malthus taught), on the topic of “The Misapplication of Malthus”. It was based on a chapter of my book The Evolution of Everything: Parson Malthus casts a […]

UK to trigger Brexit 200 years after Ricardo’s comparative advantage My Times column on free trade after Brexit: The prime minister wants Britain to be “the most passionate, most consistent, most convincing advocate for free trade”. Under  either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and with world trade stagnating, it looks as if the job is […]