A couple of weeks ago, I was on the panel for a debate on the motion 'Britain should be a fan of wind energy' at the Cheltenham Science Festival. John Constable of the Renewable energy Foundation was also against the motion, while arch-environmentalist Jonathan...

Back in 2010, I had a look at an Oxfam report which claimed that, According to the IPCC, climate change could halve yields from rain-fed crops in parts of Africa as early as 2020, and put 50 million more people worldwide at risk of hunger. But it was not the IPCC...

Leo Hickman has an interesting interview with James Lovelock here, and a fuller transcript of their discussion here. Given that Lovelock predicted in 2006 that by this century's end "billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in...

The last few posts have been about the application of the precautionary principle. In some green perspectives, precaution operates overtly, and arguments about risk are made explicitly. In other cases, the precautionary principle still operates, but is hidden from...

Two numbers from this weekends Guardian/Observer... The first is 25%. Damian Carrington whinges that George Osborne demands massive cuts to windfarm subsidies PM's 'greenest government ever' claim undermined by chancellor's move, which follows pressure from Tory MPs...

Yesterday, I tried to explain why pro-GM environmentalists had misconceived the perspectives of their anti-GM colleagues as simply 'scientific illiteracy'. In particular, I was amazed that Keith Kloor had turned a central tenet of environmentalism -- the precautionary...

The issue of genetically modified food crops has resurfaced. This issue has a long history, and my last attempt to compile an account of it was back in May 2009, here. One of the things I've written a bit about is the differences between two parts of the environmental...

I'm a big fan of scientific videos and visualisation generally. Here's a wonderful recent example. There is a hazard, here though, in taking such images at face value, as is described at length on this blog. What we see in the above video is not just the planet; we...

I have an article up on Spiked today, about the absurdity that is the looming Rio+20 conference. Forty years on, and those predictions of doom have not been borne out. The average life expectancy of a human has increased by 10 years, and the number of infants dying...