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Here is a letter I sent to the editor and deputy editor of The Economist.   A comment on the piece by James Astill about the Berkeley temperature study. Most of the article is a sensible discussion of a deadly dull piece of statistics that changes nothing. But it’s topped and tailed with claims that this leaves […]

Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is the extraordinary story of modern chicken genetics. Of all the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals in the world, the most abundant species is probably the chicken. At any one time, approximately 20 billion cocks and hens are alive on the planet (though never for long). […]

Donna Laframboise is a journalist and civil libertarian in Toronto, who made her name as a fearless investigative reporter in the 1990s. She has recently been investigating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has come up with startling results about how its reports are compiled. For those of us who took the IPCC’s evaluations […]

Here’s my latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal:   Writing about science carries the risk of embarrassment. If you champion a theory and it gets disproved, you have some explaining to do. So it is nice when a theory you choose does win the race.   In the early 1990s I wrote […]

Here’s an article I wrote for this week’s Spectator about UK energy policy. Wind must give way to gas before it ruins us all, and our landscapes. Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s […]

  Fenbeagle has done a cartoon featuring a rational optimist…    

From My latest Mind and Matter Column at he Wall Street Journal: The science of evolutionary psychology has flourished in recent years by asking “why” as well as “how” questions about animal and human behavior, and answering them with historical explanations. John S. Dykes For example, why are most male mammals keen on promiscuity, while most […]

I have a book review in the Wall Street Journal of Robert Laughlin’s book Powering the Future. These are the first two paragraphs: Many environmentalists believe that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels will cause a climate crisis toward the end of this century. Environmentalists also raise the alarm that we have reached “peak oil” […]

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on metaphors and analogies: Monkeys can reason by using analogy, it seems. In an experiment recently reported in the journal Psychological Science, baboons in a lab proved capable of realizing that a pair of oval shapes is “like” a pair of square shapes and […]

Fascinating interview with the founder of Continental Resources Harold Hamm in the Wall Street Journal. Harold Hamm calculates that if Washington would allow more drilling permits for oil and natural gas on federal lands and federal waters, the government could over time raise $18 trillion in royalties. That’s more than the U.S. national debt. The Bakken […]