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Asymmetric planning for weather
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Reputation, weather and climate
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Matt Ridley
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 […]
Matt Ridley
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 […]
How new words and new genes are coined
Matt Ridley
In the evolution of a language, the same principles apply to DNA as to English My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal, with added links: Don’t look for the soul in the language of DNA Back in the genomic bronze age-the 1990s-scientists used to think that there would prove to be lots […]
The strange lack of limits to growth
Matt Ridley
Why do people have more resources when there are more of them? Here’s an interview I did with the `Five Book’s’ website in which I selected five books on techno-optimism: Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2 Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist Huber and Mills’s The Bottomless Well Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline The key question […]
Cancer, chemicals, Carson and smoking
Matt Ridley
Rachel Carson, in her hugely influential book Silent Spring, wrote that she expected an epidemic of cancer caused by chemicals in the environment, especially DDT, indeed she thought it had already begun in the early 1960s: “No longer are exposures to dangerous chemicals occupational alone; they have entered the environment of everyone-even of children as yet […]
Matt Ridley
Britain tries to reverse the industrial revolution Update: the photo above shows a wind turbine’s parts blocking a road in Wales. Two hundred years ago, Britain discovered how to make energy cheaper and cheaper, which caused a rush to mechanisation, which raised living standards all around the world by making it easier to fulfil people’s […]
