In Friday's Independent, Johann Hari has achieved a quite remarkable feat. How I wish that the global warming deniers were right Are you prepared to take a 50-50 gamble on the habitability of the planet? In just 1400 words he manages to cram in just about every...
Beware: Health Warnings
Speaking of self-fulfilling prophecies, which we often are, Stu has a feature in today's FT magazine about the negative impacts on our health of precautionary health advice: Worried Sick What if health warnings could make us ill? Actually, they can - it's called the...
Know Your Times
>> UPDATE: Gore uses the flawed NYT article in his testimony to congress. READ MORE. << New York Times journalist, Andrew Revkin, generally writes thoughtfully in the paper, and on his Dot Earth blog, even if we generally disagree with him. However,...
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...
Smoking Out Unreasonable Certainty
In conversations with our exasperated green friends, we are often asked what we would accept as 'proof' that global warming ‘is real, and is happening'. This is a fairly typical misunderstanding of the sceptical position. Well, ours anyway. We do not argue that humans...
Something old, something blue, something borrowed, something green
Bernard Ingham, former press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, asks in the Yorkshire Post (H/T Benny Peiser): In the election for London's Mayor, the Greens got just over three per cent of the vote. Leaving aside such misguided places as Norwich, where the Green Party...
A Textbook Case of Politics
You can say whatever you like about climate change, just as long as it doesn't appear to undermine political action to 'save the planet'. You can, for example, be the billionaire founder of the world's first international, 24-hour TV news channel, and claim that in...
The Return of the Precautionary Principle
Last Friday, we asked 'what happened to the precautionary principle'. Recent arguments dominating the public discussion on climate change seem to have been about the 'scientific consensus' achieving certainty, rather than advising caution in the face of doubt. Yet on...
What Happened to the Precautionary Principle?
It only seems like yesterday that the Precautionary Principle was the standard currency of Environmentalist rhetoric. But like acid rain and global cooling, the precautionary principle seems to be disappearing from the Green lexicon. Increasingly, Environmentalists...
Blaise the Lord
This is the first in a mini-series of posts about videos that really annoy us. First up - "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See": Greg (we almost feel a little bit bad for having...