Go Forth and Multiply

Anyone doubting that environmentalists' doomsday visions of the future owe more to religion than science should know that Greenpeace are building an ark on Mount Ararat. No, really.

Word of the Day: Extravagate

Sir Harry Kroto laments the fall in applications to science degrees at UK universities. "Without first-class science graduates, how will we understand and deal with the crises caused by global warming?" The facts that a) we use in one year an amount of fossil fuel...

Six Degrees

Josie Appleton has written an excellent review of Mark Lynas' book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet Appleton takes issue with many of Lynas' claims and dismal prophecies, and lucidly argues that catastrophic narratives offered by environmentalists may owe...

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...

Respect the facts

Sir, – “Nullius in Verba”, the motto of the Royal Society, is usually translated as “on the word of no one”. That is a fine motto, the message being that knowledge about the material universe should be based on appeals to experimental evidence rather than authority....

Spaghetti Carbondrama

This post doesn't deserve a title as good as that. And it's not even a very good title. Where does carbon come into it? Maybe we're just hungry.Apologies. We have each been otherwise engaged to the extent that we don't appear to have posted very much. And even now,...

CR in TLS

We have a letter in this week's Times Literary Supplement on Bob May's translation of Nullius in Verba. It's not much different from our original post on the subject, except all the commas are in exactly the right place.Sir, – “Nullius in Verba”, the motto of the...

Edjukashun Educayshun Ejewkashan

Crisis politics expresses itself most visibly in any debate about children. Children are such a problem for the government that on top of countless other 'initiatives' devised to make sure they are obedient, don't get fat, don't have sex, dont do drugs, don't smoke,...

Auditing RMS

Following our post last week about Bob Ward and his involvement in Risk Management Solutions, there's a lively discussion on the subject going on over at Climate Audit.

Scientific Theory or Sinking Ship?

According to a new theory, people who fail to act to reduce their CO2 emissions are similar psychologically to rats.Many people know about the dangers of global warming, but only few act... On the one hand, human beings get stubbornly comfortable in their habits. On...