Sir Mark Walport’s demand that climate-change sceptics ‘grow up’ only reveals his ignorance about the climate debate. According to an article in The Times (London) earlier this week, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Mark Walport, is about to start a...
The ‘green crap’ hits its fans
Sorry, David Cameron - you're now stuck with the green policies you yourself advocated. Last week, the Sun and the Daily Mail reported a Downing Street insider’s claims that David ‘vote-blue-go-green’ Cameron now wants to ‘get rid of all the green crap’. Whether this...
Greenpeace: talking out of a polar bear’s arse
A recent Greenpeace protest only demonstrated that environmentalism is not a mass movement. Earlier this month, around 3,000 Greenpeace members and supporters marched from Parliament to Shell’s London offices to protest against what they claim is the oil giant’s...
The pathologising of climate scepticism
ESSAY: The shoddy science of sceptic-bashing LOG12 attempts to turn criticism into a psychological illness. As the influence of environmental thinking has increased its hold over the political establishment, the failure to win the public support that might create the...
The Royal Society’s ‘motto-morphosis’
Nullius in Verba, the motto of the prestigious Royal Society in London, is usually translated as ‘on the word of no one’. When it was coined back in 1663, it was intended to distance science from the methods of the ancient universities, which relied heavily on the...
Every silver lining has a cloud
Little is certain in the field of global climate prediction. But one thing is for sure: if all those worst-case scenarios made so much of by environmentalists come true, we really are screwed. So you might expect those same environmentalists to be rather excited by a...
Debunking the debunkers
There should be more to scepticism than angry rants about stupid religious people or New Age mysticism. Responding to the apparent rise and rise of ‘bunk’ - creationism, homeopathy, fad diets and bad science - a new movement of sceptics is mobilising to defend the...
A chilling climate for science
'Art was made to disturb, science reassures.' Like all the best quotes, this one from cubist painter Georges Braque makes you think, but it doesn't quite ring true. Both science and art have the capacity to disturb and reassure. Scientific breakthroughs - like the...