The Perth of my youth was a friendly West Australian town, half asleep by the bays and reaches of the Swan. We called ourselves the “Wildflower State”. Perhaps the “Flogging and Hanging State” would be more apt. First, I’ll reminisce about the hangings, then the floggings. In 1964 when I was a reporter and part-time … Continue reading →

7.30 last night the French prime minister went on TV to urge citizens to “show some discipline and get their act together” – by staying at home. He announced that all cafés bars restaurants and other “non-essential commercial outlets” were to close at midnight until further notice. The government will compensate them and their employees … Continue reading →

Tony Thomas How nice of the Sydney Peace Prize people to award its Gold Medal for Human Rights this month to Christiana Figueres, top negotiator of the toothless 2015 Paris climate accord. The Sydney Peace Foundation, backed by the City of Sydney and Sydney University, somewhat incoherently cited the good lady’s ‘relentless drive to ensure … Continue reading →

Climate science and the stock market have this in common: both are obsessed with observation of, and speculation about, a simple time graph, showing, in the one case, movements of average global temperature over periods from months to millennia, and in the other, movements of share values over periods from milliseconds to months. Zapping from … Continue reading →

Freeman Dyson verified statistically at Bomber Command’s Operations Research  that  crews’ chance of survival on missions did not increase with experience. About 75 per cent of crew never completed their 30-ops tours, but which planes were shot down turned out to be entirely random… My science hero is Richard Feynman, but his understudy, Freeman Dyson … Continue reading →

  It’s a depressing fact that the freethinkers on the internet whom I most admire for their courage, intelligence, and scepticism about the official line, who are doing for free or peanuts the job that journalists no longer do, nearly always let me down when it comes to climate change hysteria. Take Craig Murray, the … Continue reading →

Have our climate models been wrong? This is the title of a new episode of the BBC World Service’s “The Inquiry”, available here on BBC sounds. It’s about the emphasis on RCP 8.5, often misleadingly referred to as “business as usual”. After introducing the topic via James Hansen’s call to action in 1988, and the … Continue reading →