Extreme weather is less of a threat than it ever has been. When Hurricane Harvey landed on Texas, it marked the end of a 12-year lull in major hurricanes hitting the US. This period – which also featured a long ‘hiatus’ in global warming, the failure of ice-free...
Diesel charges: pushing poor drivers off the road
London mayor Sadiq Khan is waging war on diesel. His latest move is an exclusion of certain diesel cars from London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ). From April 2019, drivers of diesel cars built before September 2015 must pay an additional charge to use the roads...
How the pollution panic hurts the poor
London's air isn't shortening people's lives – poverty is. This month, cold, windless weather helped trap vehicle exhaust within London’s narrow streets, and story after story appeared in the media, declaring the city’s air to be worse than Beijing’s. Read more at...
London is not bound in toxic smog
The scaremongering about air pollution is blighting innovation in the capital. Earlier this month, a spate of news stories suggested that London was experiencing an air-pollution crisis. Just one week into 2017, for instance, the Guardian reported that ‘Brixton Road...
It’s the End of the World… As They Know it
One of the hypotheses posited on this blog is that the preoccupation with the end of the world is in reality a displaced existential, and altogether far more internal crisis. Where you can see climate alarmism, you can see a crisis afflicting the individual,...
Ask a Stupid Question
A premise of democracy that I believe is worth defending is that it is incumbent on those seeking either change or for the status quo to be sustained to define and defend their arguments, even against robust criticism, and even against seemingly stupid and evil...
The Grimey "Science" of Conspiracy Theories
David Robert Grimes has emerged from Lewandowsky's shadow, again, to go forth increase and multiply the bullshit/batshit/bad science quotient of the social and behavioural sciences -- as if they needed it. Grimes's new paper On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs...
Paris talks: agreeing to dodge democracy
Climate advocacy has become a refuge for political no-hopers. Last week in Paris, a long-sought-after agreement to limit climate change was finally arrived at. A successor to the previous agreement – the Kyoto Protocol – had been hard to find. Bitter and farcical...
Freedom to Invent ‘Information’
Back in June, chair of the UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC) John Gummer, aka Lord Deben, appeared on BC Radio 4’s Today programme to talk about the CCC’s new report , 'Reducing emissions and preparing for climate change: 2015 Progress Report to Parliament'. The...
The world needs more energy, not green BS
Western governments and agencies are now standing in the way of development. Earlier this month, a report from the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health announced that ‘fecal sludge’ might be one answer to several of the world’s...