Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

My latest column in The Times:

This is an article about a railway, but it begins with a wall; bear with me. I live not far from the line of Hadrian’s Wall and I often take visitors to marvel at its almost 1,900-year-old stones. That the Romans could build 80 miles of dressed stone fortification, 15ft high and 9ft wide, over crags and bogs with a small fort every mile, is indeed a marvel. It was one of Rome’s most expensive projects.

Yet I often ask visitors as they marvel: did it work? The answer is no. The Roman garrison was too strung out to defend the whole thing at once. Within 30 years it had been successfully attacked by the barbarians; within 40 it had been abandoned for a new wall in Scotland; when that did not work and Hadrian’s Wall became the boundary again, it was overrun by barbarians several times. Did it exclude or pacify the tribes of northern Britain? I doubt it.

My Times column:

Tomorrow the House of Lords gives a second reading to Lord Sharkey’s Bill to pardon Alan Turing, the mathematician, computer pioneer and code-cracking hero of the Second World War.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted for being gay (he had reported a burglary to the police and made it no secret that the burglar was a friend of his consensual lover). Convicted of “gross indecency” he was offered prison or oestrogen injections to reduce his libido; he chose the latter but then committed suicide at the age of 41.

My column in The Times on healthcare costs:

Babies got cheaper this week. Twice. First, Belgian scientists announced that their new method has the potential to cut the costs of some in-vitro fertilisation treatments from £5,000 to below £200. Their cut-price recipe requires little more than baking soda and lemon juice in place of purified carbon dioxide gas to maintain acidity when growing an embryo in a lab before implanting it.

Second, a baby called Connor was born after 13 of his parents’ embryos had their genomes analysed using next-generation DNA-sequencing techniques in an Oxford laboratory. Only three of the embryos were found to have the right chromosome number, and one of these “normal” embryos was then implanted in his mother. This new approach, made possible by the rapidly falling cost of DNA sequencing, promises to cut the number of failures during IVF, reducing both cost and heartache.

Part of the problem was that some time towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century it became clear that the Earth's average temperature just was not consistently rising any more, however many "adjustments" were made to the thermometer records, let alone rising anything like as rapidly as all the models demanded.

So those who made their living from alarm, and by then there were lots, switched tactics and began to jump on any unusual weather event, whether it was a storm, a drought, a blizzard or a flood, and blame it on man-made carbon dioxide emissions. This proved a rewarding tactic, because people - egged on by journalists - have an inexhaustible appetite for believing in the vindictiveness of the weather gods. The fossil fuel industry was inserted in the place of Zeus as the scapegoat of choice. (Scientists are the priests.)

The fact that people have short memories about weather events is what enables this game to be played. The long Australian drought of 2001-7, the Brisbane floods of 2009-10 and the angry summer of 2012-13 stand out in people's minds. People are reluctant to put them down to chance. Even here in mild England, people are always saying "I have never known it so cold/hot/mild/windy/wet/dry/changeable as it is this year". One Christmas I noticed the seasons had been pretty average all year, neither too dry nor too wet nor too cold nor too warm. "I have never known it so average," I said to somebody. I got a baffled look. Nobody ever calls the weather normal.

My latest (and last) Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:

Last week a friend chided me for not agreeing with the scientific consensus that climate change is likely to be dangerous. I responded that, according to polls, the "consensus" about climate change only extends to the propositions that it has been happening and is partly man-made, both of which I readily agree with. Forecasts show huge uncertainty.

Besides, science does not respect consensus. There was once widespread agreement about phlogiston (a nonexistent element said to be a crucial part of combustion), eugenics, the impossibility of continental drift, the idea that genes were made of protein (not DNA) and stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and so forth—all of which proved false. Science, Richard Feyman once said, is "the belief in the ignorance of experts.

My Times column:

Exciting as Britain’s latest shale gas estimate is — 47 years’ supply or more — it pales beside what is happening in the United States. There shale gas is old hat; the shale oil revolution is proving a world changer, promising not just lower oil prices worldwide, but geopolitical ripples as America weans itself off oil imports and perhaps loses interest in the Middle East.

One of the pioneers of the shale gas revolution, Chris Wright, of Liberty Resources, was in Britain last month. It was he and his colleagues at Pinnacle Technologies who reinvented hydraulic fracturing in the late 1990s in a way that unlocked the vast petroleum resources in shale. Within seven years the Barnett shale, in and around Forth Worth, Texas, was producing half as much gas as the whole of Britain consumes. And the Barnett proved to be a baby compared with other shales.

I have an article in Spiked! on the the tyranny of consumer choice:

This summer at TED Global in Edinburgh, a lively networking conference, there was a talk on one of the true and terrible scourges of the modern world. This is a bit of a theme for TED. The same scourge was bravely but mercilessly exposed at TED Global three years ago in Oxford and nine years ago at the ur-TED itself in California. All three talks went down well with the hip folk who attend TED meetings. They nodded in agreement that this scourge must end, and soon.

The scourge in question? The thing that deserved as prominent a castigation as disease and poverty and tyranny? Too much choice. Yes, the pressing and urgent issue we face is that when we enter a supermarket, we find tens of brands of cereal and it is making us – wait for it – anxious. Oh woe.