Here’s a question for you to take your mind off COVID-19: Who is your favourite bear? Is it Paddington? Or maybe it’s Rupert. For many it is Yogi, who is, after all, smarter than the average. Personally, I always had a soft spot for Boo-Boo. But if my life depended upon it, I think I … Continue reading
Category Archives: Uncategorized
” Kill Climate Deniers” meets “44 Sex Acts”
David Finnigan, who wrote the daintily-titled play Kill Climate Deniers, is adding more lustre to the arts scene with his self-styled “romantic comedy”, titled 44 Sex Acts in One Week. It involves “endurance stunt f***ing”. His inspirational play made the short list of five for the national best-new-play award by Griffin Theatre in Sydney last month. In … Continue reading
What The Leicester Lockdown Report Might Say About Herd Immunity
I’ve been reading RT articles again and I just know that Andy West will disapprove! This particular one is written by Peter Andrews, Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics. But not to worry … Continue reading
Covid & Climate Contrarianism: Two Sides Of The Same Coin
It is an article of faith: climate change is dangerous. Dare to criticise that view and, as a non scientist, you will be labelled a ‘climate denier’ and a crank. As a scientist, you will also be called a denier and a crank, as well as being ex-communicated, ostracised, hounded, disciplined, humiliated, vilified, cancelled, forced … Continue reading
Fear For Sale
Ever since I had learnt that I could drop the leading ‘e’ in the word ‘extreme’ and get away with it, I knew that I was one of society’s thrill seekers. It started in the workplace with ‘xtreme programming’ but it wasn’t long before I had taken my adrenalin addiction home with me and I … Continue reading
Interrogating climate modelling
Whatever skills and expertise are required for that, Michael Gove thinks they are needed in the civil service and in government: That same determination to instil and cultivate deep knowledge should apply across Government. Too much current Civil Service training is about vapid abstractions such as ‘Collaborating Better’ rather than about what works in classroom … Continue reading
Jumping the Pangolin
Time was when a popular history of our modern world would begin: “In Sarajevo, a fatal shot from a Serbian nationalist rang out, killing the Archduke Ferdinand…” Future histories of the 21stcentury will no doubt open with: “In a Wuhan wet market, a bat shat on a pangolin..” No, really. It’s been reported from the … Continue reading
Recent Antarctic ‘Meltdown’ Is Natural Variability
The accelerated warming in West Antarctica (WA) and the Antarctic Peninsula (AP) is due to a natural mode of climate change according to a very recently released paper in AAAS. It’s been known for some time that the pronounced warming in WA compared to East Antarctica (EA) was very likely due to a mode of … Continue reading
Nudging Towards Bethlehem
Lewandowsky has a new article out in Nature Human Behaviour co-authored with Cass Sunstein, [the Artful Nudger] lead author Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, post-doctoral fellow at the Berlin Center for Adaptive Rationality, (no, really) and the Center’s director Ralph Hertwig. Authors Stephan Lewandowsky and Ralph Hertwig thank the Volkswagen Foundation for their support (presumably financial, and not merely automotive.) It’s … Continue reading
The Mask of the Medusa and the People’s Johnson
In a comment on another post I mentioned this article in which the Observer’s science editor reports on a new piece of insanity published in the Lancet. As so often, the insane nonsense we’re being fed is only revealed for what it is when it’s in a scientific article taken apart by other scientists. It’s … Continue reading
