Matt Ridley is the author of How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (2020), and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (2021)
The centenary of the start of the first world war is getting much more attention than the tricentenary of the accession of George I, which also falls this week. As far as I can tell, no new biographies of the first Hanoverian king are imminent, whereas books on the great war are pouring forth. You
If somebody invented a pill that could cure a disease that kills five million people a year worldwide, 100,000 of them in this country, the medical powers that be would surely encourage it, pay for it, perhaps even make it compulsory. They certainly would not stand in its way. A relentless stream of data from
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_3_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Matt Ridley and Fraser Nelson discuss the IPCC’s latest report” startat=67] Listen [/audioplayer]Nigel Lawson was right after all. Ever since the Centre for Policy Studies lecture in 2006 that launched the former chancellor on his late career as a critic of global warming policy, Lord Lawson has been stressing the need to adapt
My Spectator cover story on the net benefits of climate change sparked a lot of interest. There was an explosion of fury from all the predictable places. Yet not one of my critics managed to disprove my central assertion, that climate change is probably causing net benefits now and is likely to continue doing so
Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not some barmy, right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion. Yet almost nobody seems to know this. Whenever I make the point in public, I am told by those
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 of a tennis court, just off the beach at Cambois, north of Blyth, which for some
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 hope in the fact that ash, unlike elms, reproduce sexually so they are not clones — uniformly vulnerable to the
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published 50 years ago this month, effectively marked the birth of the modern environmental movement. ‘Silent Spring came as a cry in the wilderness, a deeply felt, thoroughly researched, and brilliantly written argument that changed the course of history,’ wrote Al Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition. Mr Gore
The government has finally seen through the wind-farm scam – but why did it take them so long? 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
With each passing year it becomes clearer that the cure for global warming is worse than the disease. While wind power and biofuels devastate ecosystems and economies, temperatures and sea levels rise ever more slowly, just as the greenhouse theory— minus feedbacks — predicts. As James Delingpole acutely observes, the true believers are left with
The arguments for wind farms just became obsolete. We’re entering an era when gas will be cheap, plentiful – and green 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 column with blades noisily thrumming the
They’re thriving – and they’re hungry 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 that this month’s tragedy is evidence that they are getting hungrier and more desperate
The government’s new emissions target will despoil the countryside, rob the poor – and enrich landowners like me ‘Greener food and greener fuel’ is the promise of Ensus, a firm that opened Europe’s largest (£250 million) bio-ethanol plant at Wilton on Teesside last year, and has now shut it down for lack of profitable customers.
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 the same way that genetically modified crops called the bluff of the organic farming movement. Just as GM allows
Has Antarctica been getting warmer? To the frustration of many environmentalists, it’s not an easy question. Manned weather stations have existed there for over 50 years, unmanned stations from 1980 onwards. Coverage is patchy both in space and time, with weather stations clustered in a few spots and records full of gaps from when sensors
Journalists are wont to moan that the slow death of newspapers will mean a disastrous loss of investigative reporting. The web is all very well, they say, but who will pay for the tenacious sniffing newshounds to flush out the real story? ‘Climategate’ proves the opposite to be true. It was amateur bloggers who scented
Last week, snorkelling into a small bay on Chatham Island (San Cristobal), I looked up from watching a sea lion twist and turn underwater between a novelist and a neuroscientist to see a large man dressed in an incongruous overcoat standing with his back to us on a rocky outcrop. I wiped my goggles and
Darwin’s Sacred Cause, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel In 1858, on the brink of publishing his theory of evolution, which I discussed here three weeks ago, Charles Darwin took a hydropathic rest cure at Moor Park, near Farnham in Surrey. While walking on the sandy heath,
Matt Ridley says that Darwinian selection explains the appearance of seemingly ‘designed’ complexity throughout the world — not just in biology but in the economy, technology and the arts Charles Darwin, who was born 200 years ago next month, has spent the 150 years since he published The Origin of Species fighting for the idea
On one day last year, when I was in Princeton to give a lecture, I separately bumped into three scientists writing books about God. Lee Silver’s Challenging Nature is about the parallels between Christian fundamentalism in America and eco-fundamentalism in Europe; Dean Hamer’s The God Gene was written (he told me) to pay off a