Five months is a long time in climate politics. The arguments change with the seasons. Back in the hazy days of July and August, the eco-newswires were dominated by stories about ‘record-breaking’ arctic ice extent – even though it wasn’t record-breaking, and the...
Oiling the Wheel of Despair at the Edge of Scare City
The future is bleak. That seems to be the message that everybody wheeled into the public spotlight is keen to tell us. Indeed, if you can't say that the future is bleak, you have no business being on the news. Other than the current comparisons to today's economic...
Rewriting Slavery
In the August edition of History Today, Jean-Francois Mouhot argues that 'reliance on fossil fuels has made slave owners of us all'. Hmm. Most of us approach slavery with the underlying assumption that our modern civilization is morally far superior to the barbaric...
Environmentalism According to Lucas
Over the last year, we have looked at some of the words and ideas coming from the environmental movement through the Green Party's MEP for SE England, Caroline Lucas. With her breathless, urgent catastrophism, Lucas epitomises Environmentalism and its hollow vision,...
US Presidential Candidates in “Ties to Industry” Shock
Catherine Brahic, "New" "Scientist"'s online environment reporter continues to reflect the magazine's confusion between environmental science and environmental politics. If I didn't know better, I'd say "so much for the pulling power of oil money". Reports suggested...
The Well-Funded “Well-Funded Denial Machine” Denial Machine
One of the arguments which frequently emerge from the warmers in climate change debates is that the scientific expertise of sceptics has been bought – literally – by oil companies. We see this tired argument again wheeled out in the aftermath of the Inhofe 400 list....
Black, Green and Grayling
Just to say that we have found ourselves distracted by that nice man Anthony Grayling, who has been good enough to respond to our post on his recent CiF piece and provide us with an opportunity to practise our polite disagreement skills.
Black Stuff Turns Grayling Green
On Commentisfree, A.C. Grayling, Professor of Philosphy at Birkbeck College London, writes in "An antidote to the black poison" Over-determination is a particularly interesting phenomenon as it besets efforts to arrive at explanations in the social sciences. [...] And...
Scientific Consenseless
Writing in New Scientist this week, James Hansen tells us that the scientific community (you know, those 'thousands' of specialised scientists at the IPCC) are wrong, and have massively underestimated the extent of polar ice melting as a consequence of anthropogenic...