New Year, New Site

Happy new year... As you can see, we have a new site design, on a new server. Please feel free to express any thoughts about it in the comments. Anything need to be changed? Could something be better? Is it easy to navigate/read?

Cancun & the Met Office

I have a story on Spiked today, about the pre-Cancun messages from the Met Office. In retrospect, I wish I'd called it "Some of our Global Warming is Missing", but I expect it's been said before. Conventional climate wisdom has it that once ‘the science’ is put before...

Climate Science and the Climate Debate

I've been too busy for blogging recently. To break the silence, I thought I'd post this presentation I gave at a debate at York University this time last year. The discussion was about the view often expressed by environmentalists that there is no need for any further...

Pastiche Politics: Redux

The previous post on this blog looked at the bizarre relationship between former Labour government minister (now Labour Party leader) Ed Miliband, and the 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid director, Franny Armstrong. One of the most curious things that this uneasy...

Going Green, or Growing Mould?

During my very busy spring and summer, one of the things I didn’t have time to do was look more closely at the UK’s General Election results. This post comes a bit late, but it’s worth saying, nonetheless. The election was perhaps the dullest and least inspiring in...

The Environmentalist’s Paradox that Wasn’t a Paradox

Leo Hickman, Guardian’s ‘ethical’ agony aunt, usually occupies himself with the kind of pointless, trivial, and often completely bizarre ethical questions that only trouble the most moneyed and morally-disoriented environmentalist: Which is the most eco-friendly...

Lomborg's Technology-Led Policy

Roger Pielke Jr has a post about Bjorn Lomborg's apparent turnaround on the climate issue. Specifically, his proposal for a low (starting and rising) carbon tax to fund innovation comes directly from the work of Isabel Galiana and Chris Green (in the video above) of...

What Happens When the Think-Tank is Empty of Thought?

As has been said before on this blog, environmentalism is not as much an concrete idea in itself as it is a constellation of phenomena. Its parts move independently to intersect with many other issues. One such convergence of issues is epitomised by the New Economics...

Statistical Insignificance

Statistical Insignificance 25 months ago, Andrew Simms, Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation (NEF), warned that there are only 100 months to save the planet. Writing in the Guardian today, he reminds us that there are only 75 months of his deadline...

The Grief Lectures 2010 – Part Three

In the previous two posts, I looked at the first lectures by Royal Society president, Martin Rees. This post relates to his third of four lectures, ‘What We’ll Never Know’. Lighter on the doom, it is a less dark story than the previous lectures. Indeed, Rees makes...