Thanksgiving is a good time to express our sincere gratitude that we no longer “enjoy” the “simpler life of yesteryear.” As my grandmother said, “The only good thing about the good old days is that they’re gone.” For countless millennia, mankind lived on a precipice, in hunter-gatherer, subsistence farmer and primitive urban industrial societies powered […]

How should a sensible conservative view climate change? I have several concerns: the air of hysteria used to promote it as a cause; the science behind it; the remedies that are proposed to stem it; and the cost of those remedies. First, I am somewhat sceptical about the ideology of climate change, the phenomenon formerly […]

Some climate scientists still struggle to cope with people who disagree So a few days back, Cliff Mass – a Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington as well as a radio weatherman – decided to write something about the wildfires in California, and in particular, the question of whether climate change had […]

If costs really have gone down, windfarm operators will take subsidy cuts in their stride In the Times this morning, energy correspondent Emily Gosden reports on the latest news from the UK’s capacity market (link £): The government has slashed the financial support on offer for new offshore wind farms, forcing developers to find further […]

I once appeared on the Jeremy Vine show opposite the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who made some surprising claims about drought in East Africa, which he said had been getting worse for decades. Shortly after the show, I did some digging and failed to turn up anything that would support his view. I was reminded […]

The world is in better shape than most people think, but we’re more inclined to focus on bad news than good. Psychology can help explain why. Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years? When the Swedish statistician […]

If we are going to burn more wood, who will see the benefits? The Committee on Climate Change, the government’s advisers on how to achieve its carbon budgets, published a pair of reports yesterday – one on the use of biomass and one on the related subject of land use.  There are some remarkable points […]

In their mad dash to prove their global warming bona fides, major media have simply thrown skepticism out the window. What’s left is climate religion. Everyone makes mistakes, but some mistakes are bigger than others. That’s the case with a recent study based on a climate model that claimed the oceans had retained 60% more […]