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George Monbiot’s attack on me in the Guardian is very misleading George Monbiot’s recent attack on me in the Guardian is misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much more balanced than Monbiot’s selective quotations imply. I argue that the state’s role in sometimes impeding or destroying the process that […]

Jonathon Porritt versus Jonathan Dimbleby In my book I quote the English environmentalist Jonathon Porritt as follows: ‘It’s blindingly obvious [that] completely unsustainable population growth in most of Africa will keep it permanently, hopelessly, stuck in deepest, darkest poverty.’ At first I had assumed that the quote, which I had found in another book, must […]

Average incomes of the poor now exceed those of the rich 50 years ago. In my book I point out that an unemployed British father of three on welfare today receives more in state support than a man on the average wage received in income in 1957. It’s an eye-catching reminder of how wrong J […]

Caution should be applied to predictions as well as to risks Tim Black has an excellent article in Spiked about the hypercautious European reaction to the Icelandic volcano in April: We have since discovered that the maximum density of ash (100 micrograms of ash per cubic metre) over the UK during the ban was one […]

Canadian style The Globe and Mail (Toronto) has made a nice new version of my “handaxe and mouse” image to illustrate their review of The Rational Optimist  

Around 7,000 years ago it was much, much warmer all around the globe. There’s a lot of debate about the `Medieval Warm Period’. But I’ve always been intrigued by the warm period of 7,000 years ago, known as the Holocene Optimum, and I have been doing some digging to find out just how warm it […]

Everything from star signs to slavery and coals to Newcastle Listen to my interview on NPR’s Leonard Lopate Show and an MP3 of my interview on PM with Marc Colvin, in Australia

Bacteria that live in the clouds and the prospect of controlling the weather My good friend Dave Sands is not only a brilliant biologist — I cite him in The Rational Optimist arguing for genetic modification to improve the quality rather than the quantity of food — but a very fine poet. He’s profiled in yesterday’s […]

Pollution from driven cars has fallen so fast it is now below that of parked cars in 1970 One small fact in my book has caught several readers’ attention: Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at full speed than a parked car did in 1970 from leaks. My source for this remarkable statistic was […]

Jon Henley interviews Matt Ridley: The Rational Optimist is, essentially, about progress: how, of all the species on earth, only humans have managed so radically and completely to change the way they live. Animals, even the most intelligent ones, have not thus far known “economic growth” or “rising living standards” or “technological revolutions” (or, indeed, […]