WELCOME TO MATT RIDLEY'S BLOG

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 […]

My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall Street Journal is on how the future turns out: Last month a crash dummy flew to 5,000 feet above ground level in a personal jet pack. The inventor, New Zealander Glenn Martin, has spent decades on the project and is ready to start selling the device for […]

One of six books The Rational Optimist has been short-listed for the Samuel Johnson prize for the best non-fiction book of 2010. I’m thrilled.

More people died of organic, local e coli than at Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon combined, yet the outrage is absent From  Andrew Bolt: Rich Fisher: One German organic farm has killed twice as many people as the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf Oil spill combined. crickets. Hello? Environmental groups?  Journalists? Hello?

Were E coli deaths preventable with food irradiation? My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall Street Journal is about the precautionary principle as exemplified by the German e coli outbreak, which has now killed 29. Less precaution about new technology might have meant fewer deaths: A technology that might have prevented contaminated produce […]