Oiling the Wheel of Despair at the Edge of Scare City

The future is bleak. That seems to be the message that everybody wheeled into the public spotlight is keen to tell us. Indeed, if you can't say that the future is bleak, you have no business being on the news.  Other than the current comparisons to today's economic...

Only Happy When It Rains

Bizarrely, this week's episode of Laurence Llewelyn Bowen's BBC Radio 4 series Laurence Llewelyn Bowen's History of Home, in which celebrity interior designer and big, flouncy ponce Laurence Llewelyn Bowen explores the history of our homes from the 1920s to the...

Contact problems

If you sent an email to us between mid August, and lunchtime today (GMT), the chances are we didn't get it. This is because we didn't maintain a mailbox properly.  It should be sorted out now. We've also been having reports of our contact page not working properly. If...

Road to an Atomic Damascus or the Green Reformation?

Poor old Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: our future on a hotter planet, who once thrust custard pies into the faces of people who dared to question environmental orthodoxies. He now finds himself on the receiving end of eco-dogma. Fancy that. Just a month ago I had...

Green-Eyed Monsters

Few ecotastrophists will be disappointed that CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has had to be shut down for at least a couple of months to fix a technical problem. Because, for a while there, the Greens' perpetual thunder about the imminent thermageddon was stolen by...

More Climate Wars

Ben has an article on Spiked-Online today, about the BBC's recent 'Climate Wars'. Iain Stewart, professor of geosciences communication at Plymouth University, introduced last week’s instalment with the words: ‘Global warming - the defining challenge of the...

Fat Polar Bears Are Killing The Polar Bears

Last July, we reported that Fat People Are Killing the Polar Bears. In November we reported that Fat Swedish Men Are Killing the Polar Bears. In April we reported that Fat Polar Bears are Killing the Penguins. In May we reported that Fat People are Killing the...

Biased Broadcasting Climate

Dr. Iain Stewart's new BBC2 series Earth: The Climate Wars promised to be a 'definitive guide' to the climate debate. Instead, this week's episode 'Fightback', which focused on the sceptics was as shallow and as hollow as any old commentary. The film's blurb on BBC...

On the Horizon

1) Battle of Ideas, 1-2 November, Royal College of Art, London If last year's event is anything to go by, it will be very good indeed. Here's Professor Mike Hulme, School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and founding Director...

All the World's a Cage

According to World Water Council's director-general Ger Bergkamp, Australia is 'the metaphorical canary down the coalmine when it comes to climate change': In Australia, what was projected to be here in 20 years from now, in terms of the drought, is already here as we...