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Brian Eno, the musician and writer,  is more positive as a result of reading The Rational Optimist: “That kind of marks the change I’ve felt in the past year or two. I wouldn’t end an album like that now,” he says. Drums Between the Bells has a loose, funky feel; it ends with the words, “Everything […]

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on the strange phenomenon of contagious cancer in dogs and Tasmanian devils, and whether it could happen to us. Elizabeth Murchison is speaking about this at the TED Global meeting in Edinburgh next week.     The human body is a teeming city of […]

The film of the book Frank Dikotter’s fine — and vital — book on Mao’s Great famine won the Samuel Johnson prize. But you can see a short film and a discussion about my book on the BBC Culture show here (from minute 17.17 onwards). It’s an honour to have made it to the shortlist.

Nic Lewis’s discovery of a statistical alteration applied by the IPCC lends strong support to lukwarming Nic Lewis’s discovery of a statistical alteration applied by the IPCC lends strong support to lukwarming   As most people know, I am a lukewarmer — somebody who accepts carbon dioxide’s full greenhouse potential, but does not accept the […]

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal: Driving home the other day it occurred to me that almost none of the greenery I could see-trees, garden shrubs, grass shoulders on the highway-was going to be used by humans for food, fuel, clothing or shelter. That would not have been true 500 years […]

New  evidence has been published that the Great Barrier Reef is not in trouble from climate change. The effects of bleaching are short-lived and reversible. When I said this in my book, I was patronised from a great height by a bunch of marine biologists in New Scientist. Will they, and New Scientist, now apologise? […]

Walter Russell Mead is always worth reading. Now he has written a two-part essay on Al Gore and the climate debate (part one; part two) that is, I think, very perceptive. It is angry, hard-hitting, and I don’t agree with everything in it, but it somehow gets to to the core of the issue in a […]

The Royal Society Book prize The Rational Optimist is one of 13 books long-listed for the Royal Society Book prize for science books. If I make it to the shortlist, this will be my fifth time on this shortlist. (I have yet to win, though!)  

Tumours evolve — so must cancer cures My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on cancer and evolution by natural selection: Last week the American Cancer Society reported that death rates from cancer are falling steadily, at an annual rate of about 1.9% in men and 1.5% in women. A study […]

How the left discovered pessimism Here is an op-ed I wrote for today’s Australian newspaper: POLLYANNA is a fool; Cassandra was wise. As a self-proclaimed “rational optimist” who argues that the world has been getting better for most people and that the future is likely to be better still, I am up against a deep prejudice […]