Ball or Aerosol?

[youtube d6IBiR9m3vY] According to the likes of Bob Ward, George Monbiot, Ben Goldacre and Steve Connor, it is a well established fact that the slump in global temperatures over three decades in the middle of the last century is the result of changes in the...

Climategate and a Tale of Two Georges

One event, seen by two environmental activists called George, produces two, contradicting stories in the Guardian. George Marshall, suggests that CRU email hacking was ‘orchestrated smear campaign’, but one which yielded no evidence of anything questionable, but that...

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...

Astroturfers and Space Cadets

Poor George Monbiot is even miserabler than usual: On the Guardian's environment site in particular, and to a lesser extent on threads across the Guardian's output, considered discussion is being drowned in a tide of vituperative gibberish. A few hundred commenters...

Monbiot's Money Myopia

George Monbiot isn't always entirely wrong. Writing in the Guardian yesterday: Why is the Medical Research Council run by an arms manufacturer? Why is the Natural Environment Research Council run by the head of a construction company? Why is the chairman of a real...

Know Your Times

>> UPDATE: Gore uses the flawed NYT article in his testimony to congress. READ MORE. << New York Times journalist, Andrew Revkin, generally writes thoughtfully in the paper, and on his Dot Earth blog, even if we generally disagree with him. However,...

George's Aga Ga-Ga and the Heathrow Hoo-Haa

George Monbiot is a very confused man. A few days ago, he announced his campaign against the Aga cooker (because it uses lots of energy). This, he said 'is indeed a class war' - the Aga is an expensive piece of kit, and therefore, you have to be rather wealthy to own...

Comment is NOT Free

Over at Comment is Free, George Monbiot attempts to rescue the eco-movement from the criticism that they're a bunch of toffs by launching a campaign to 'ban the aga'. "This is indeed a class war," he says.  So where is the campaign against Agas? There isn't one. I've...

“Welcome to the 21st Century”

A couple of our recent posts have looked unfavourably at the BBC’s coverage of the climate debate, in particular the three part series, Earth: the Climate Wars. But it’s not all bad at the Beeb, and it’s not fair to characterise their output as entirely biased in...