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A debate in the Wall Street Journal     Update: here are some readers’ letters about our exchange. I’ve never arm-wrestled Bill Gates, but we have now had a good natured debate in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here’s his effort, and here’s mine. A quote from his: Although I strongly disagree with what Mr. Ridley […]

Britain is burying its head in the sand about a new technology that is good for the environment Update: I have misled the reader about the quantity of neodymium in a wind turbine magnet. The magnet is not pure neodymium, but an alloy of Nd, iron and Boron. So there’s a lot less than 2.5 […]

Here is a spectacular speech by my good friend June Arunga, on optimism about Africa. “The broad generalisations that label Africa a continent of failure and business losses are plain wrong. They are part of that same pessimism that insists the only products worth investing in are misery and minerals.”

A response from scientists on ocean acidifciation We are getting somewhere. There is a long response to my Times article from ocean acidification scientists  here. This makes me rather happy. The response confirms the accuracy of my main points. I have sent the following response to Nature’s website, which carried a report on this matter: I […]

Neither Neanderthals nor a volatile climate caused innovation 42,000 years ago On his blog, A Very Remote Period Indeed, Julien Riel-Salvatore discusses his recent paper about Neanderthals and innovation: I’m quoted [in the press release] as saying, among other things, that this study helps ‘rehabilitate’ Neanderthals by showing that they were able to develop some of […]

Mankind enhances natural productivity as well as eats it I have just found at Spiked Online Brendan O’Neill’s superb recent essay on whether the earth is finite, and I heartily recommend it. Here’s a sample: Over the past 200 years, Malthusians have tended to look at people as simply the users-up of scarce resources. They have […]

This is not the best of all possible worlds Here is my latest Wall Street Journal column. It led me into the etymology of the word `optimism’ and the realisation that at first it meant almost the opposite of what we now mean by it, namely that the world was at its `optimum’ and could not […]

Tropical forests became more diverse during the warm episode of 55m years ago. A new paper in Science casts further doubt on the usefulness of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) as a warning of what we face from man-made carbon emissions. Tropical rain forests became more diverse, not less, during the warm spell. The paleontologist […]

Here is the letter that David MacKay sent me following my article in The Times and to which I replied. (I have gone to weblinks for his charts and in one case come up with a slightly different version — the sea ice graph I could not find the exact one he included so I have […]

Only possible in a market economy Don Boudreaux has a lovely essay in the Christian Science Monitor (interest declaration: he mentions my book) in which he makes the point people often miss about markets, that they encourage diversity rather than one-size-fits-all solutions: Contrast the multitude of different market-generated and voluntarily adopted ideas with the ideas of […]