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Clever people don’t like to think that individual cleverness is not what counts The Edge’s Annual Question is a great compilation of brief effusions from science groupies like me. This year the question was What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? My answer was this: Brilliant people, be they anthropologists, psychologists or economists, assume […]

I had this article in the Times on 14 January: The person who tips the world population over seven billion may be born this year. The world food price index hit a record high last month, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation. Bad harvests in Russia and Australia, combined with rising oil prices, have […]

The trajectories of missiles must have interested our ancestors deeply My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about parabolas, the evolution of throwing and angry birds: The spectacular trajectory of the Angry Birds computer game, from obscure Finnish iPhone app to global ubiquity-there are board games, maybe even movies in the […]

More evidence that ocean acidification is unlikely to do harm David Middleton has an interesting essay on ocean pH here. Like me he finds the literature replete with data suggesting that a realistic reduction in alkalinity caused by CO2 increases will do no net harm to marine ecosystems. For example: A recent paper in Geology (Ries et […]

Could the Brisbane flood have been moderated if officials were not obsessed with drought? The always perceptive Brendan O’Neill raises an important point about the Brisbane floods, which just may have been exacerbated by a collective institutional obsession with preparing for droughts caused by global warming (hat tip Bishop Hill). It is worth looking at  a […]

Latest Mind and Matter column is on why there is nothing so old as the recently new:   Watching friends learn kite-surfing last week, equipped not only with new designs of inflatable kites shaped like pterodactyls but new kinds of harnesses shaped like medieval chastity belts and even new helmets shaped like Elizabethan sleeping caps, it […]

What will happen to farm yields in a higher CO2 world? Here’s a sum I just did. In 2070, population will probably have grown to about 9.0 billion — an increase of 35%; CO2 levels will probably have increased to nearly 700 ppm — an increase of about 300ppm. There have now been 235 studies of […]

Dodgy long term forecasts spoil the reputations of good short-term forecasters Though I am writing this from Texas, from tomorrow I will be back in the UK and I have been checking the weather forecast for my home at the Met Office’s excellent website. By excellent, I mean both clear and accurate. I find the […]

England should no longer exist by now, according to Paul Ehrlich Fox News has dug up some remarkable botched predictions about the environment. Most are familar but three were new to me:   2. “[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures […]

A new species of Pleistocene Central Asian hominin that left some DNA behind in Melanesians The big news of the day, indeed of the year, is that we now know, almost for sure, that central Asian hominins 50,000 years ago were not Neanderthals, but a different species, the Denisovans, as distantly related to Neanderthals as […]