The net benefits of climate change till 2080

Matt Ridley

Few people know that warming is doing more good than harm My Spectator cover story on the net benefits of climate change. I will post rebuttals to the articles that criticised this piece below.   Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of […]

Spectator Diary April 2013

Matt Ridley

The cold spring weather and what it means I wrote The Spectator diary column this week: We’ve discovered that we own an island. But dreams of independence and tax-havenry evaporate when we try to picnic there on Easter Sunday: we watch it submerge slowly beneath the incoming tide. It’s a barnacle-encrusted rock, about the size […]

Diseases and pests are the real ecological threat

Matt Ridley

The bureaucracy’s carbon obsession is distracting I have an article in this week’s Spectator about ash trees and exotic pests: I’m pessimistic about the ash trees. It seems unlikely that a fungus that killed 90 per cent of Denmark’s trees and spreads by air will not be devastating here, too. There is a glimmer of […]

Tobacco denial and pesticide alarm

Matt Ridley

Rachel Carson and Al Gore relied on a tobacco denier I have an article in the Spectator drawing attention to the curious fact that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring owed much to a passionate tobacco denier. It’s behind a paywall, but there it is with the sources as links. Hat tip Ron Bailey.   Rachel Carson’s […]

The beginning of the end of wind

Matt Ridley

To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial […]

Gas against wind

Matt Ridley

Here’s an article I wrote for this week’s Spectator about UK energy policy. Wind must give way to gas before it ruins us all, and our landscapes. Which would you rather have in the view from your house? A thing about the size of a domestic garage, or eight towers twice the height of Nelson’s […]

The Polar Bear problem

Matt Ridley

It’s not that they are more desperate. it’s that they are thriving. Here is a piece I just published in the Spectator.   The terrible story of the boys mauled by a polar bear in Spitsbergen has sparked a debate about the risks of adventure travel. But what does it tell us about polar bears? Some have claimed […]

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Spectator Diary

Matt Ridley

Random thoughts on gas, songs, weather, walls and dead flies I wrote this week’s Spectator diary (no link yet): A day in London for the launch of my new report `The Shale Gas Shock’, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I argue that shale gas calls the bluff of the renewable energy movement in […]

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