Which is First: Chicken Little or the 'Perfect Storm'?

John Beddington is the UK's Chief Scientific advisor and Professor of Applied Population Biology at Imperial College, London. On Monday, the soothsayer's foresight was the subject of a BBC feature. As the world's population grows, competition for food, water and...

Folie à Deux

Reading it is enough to make you want to stop breathing... On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of...

Future-Present Imperfect Imperative

The English language is just not equipped with the verb tenses required to report environmental news stories easily. Where's the tense that would allow environment reporters to write stories about predictions about the future as if they are occurring in the present,...