Welcome to Matt Ridley's Blog

I just read a wonderful book Hybrid: the history and science of plant breeding by Noel Kingsbury.

It contains a charming story, of a Moravian priest called Father Schreiber, who was more interested in horticulture than holiness, and whose parish included Gregor Mendel's birthplace, Hyncice. As Kingsbury tells the tale:

Schreiber also had to face opposition, or at least suspicion, from a conservative peasantry. So in order to distribute new fruit varieties, he and the countess [Maria Walpurga Truchsess-Zeil, no less] developed a technique that has been used more than once down the ages in order to bring new genes to the countryside: subterfuge. A nursery for trees was established and word put out that these valuable seedlings were under guard, the guards being instructed to make a lot of noise if they heard anybody but not to actually arrest anyone. In a matter of days, all the seedlings had been stolen.

I have written a longish piece about the human footprint on the earth, avaliable as a `ChangeThis' manifesto here

Here are a few extracts:

George Monbiot's recent attack on me in the Guardian is misleading. I do not hate the state. In fact, my views are much more balanced than Monbiot's selective quotations imply. I argue that the state's role in sometimes impeding or destroying the process that generates prosperity needs to be recognised, as people from enslaved ancient Egyptians to modern North Koreans could testify. But as I mention in my book, I don't think that free markets, especially those in assets, should be completely unregulated. I do argue that free and fair commerce has the power to raise living standards.

Unlike Monbiot's article, my book isn't about me. It's about the billions of other people in the world who, through ingenuity, exchange and specialisation, have generated remarkable prosperity.

Monbiot, remember is the man who once wrote: ``every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.'' (see, George, two can play at selective quotation).

In my book I quote the English environmentalist Jonathon Porritt as follows: 'It's blindingly obvious [that] completely unsustainable population growth in most of Africa will keep it permanently, hopelessly, stuck in deepest, darkest poverty.'

At first I had assumed that the quote, which I had found in another book, must be out of context. Surely nobody would say anything so foolish or so heartless. Surely he was caricaturing some blimpish view from a reactionary? So I looked up the original article, in The Ecologist in 2007, to be sure I was not being unfair to quote him thus. You can read the whole article here. Here's the longer context of the quote.

Yet the facts speak for themselves: the fewer there are of us, the greater our personal carbon budgets - and just remember we're starting from a baseline here in the UK of around 12½ tonnes of CO2 per person!I can't tell you how politically incorrect it is to spell things out in those terms. Even those who are getting more and more enthusiastic about the idea of personal carbon budgets (including Environment Secretary David Miliband) wouldn't dream of giving voice to such a crass calculation. Leaders of our ever-so-right-on environment movement can barely bring themselves to utter the dreaded "p" word. The Millennium Development Goals don't mention population. Tony Blair's Commission for Africa ignored it entirely, even though it's blindingly obvious that completely unsustainable population growth in most of Africa will keep it permanently, hopelessly stuck in deepest, darkest poverty. Our very own Department for International Development grits its teeth and reluctantly doles out little bits of money for family planning projects, but the idea that it should be the Department's No 1 priority - if it was remotely realistic about its poverty alleviation aspirations - remains anathema to most officials and ministers.

In my book I point out that an unemployed British father of three on welfare today receives more in state support than a man on the average wage received in income in 1957. It's an eye-catching reminder of how wrong J K Galbraith was to argue that affluence in the late 1950s had already gone too far.

Now the Institute of Fiscal Studies has compiled data on average incomes in Britain since 1961, coming to the remarkable conclusion that

in real terms the bottom 25% are now considerable richer than were the top 25% in 1961.

Tim Black has an excellent article in Spiked about the hypercautious European reaction to the Icelandic volcano in April:

We have sincediscoveredthat the maximum density of ash (100 micrograms of ash per cubic metre) over the UK during the ban was one fortieth of that nowdeemeda safe threshold (4,000 micrograms of ash per cubic metre). In other words, the ban was nowhere near justified by what is now the official threshold.

He goes on to give some remarkable numbers from the similar over-reaction to avian flu:

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) has made a nice new version of my "handaxe and mouse" image to illustrate their review of The Rational Optimist

There's a lot of debate about the `Medieval Warm Period'. But I've always been intrigued by the warm period of 7,000 years ago, known as the Holocene Optimum, and I have been doing some digging to find out just how warm it was. I've come away rather amazed.

Have a look at this image, which uses stalagmites in caves to estimate ancient temperatures (as graphed by Wilis Eschenbach)

Listen to my interview on NPR's Leonard Lopate Show

and an MP3 of my interview on PM with Marc Colvin, in Australia

My good friend Dave Sands is not only a brilliant biologist -- I cite him in The Rational Optimist arguing for genetic modification to improve the quality rather than the quantity of food -- but a very fine poet. He's profiled in yesterday's New York Times discussing his latest theory that ice-forming pseudomonas bactera in the air play a central role in precipitation:

In the last few years, Dr. Sands and other researchers have accumulated evidence that the well-known group of bacteria, long known to live on agricultural crops, are far more widespread and may be part of a little-studied weather ecosystem. The principle is well accepted, but how widespread the phenomenon is remains a matter of debate.

If true, this could have all sorts of implications.

One small fact in my book has caught several readers' attention:

Today, a car emits less pollution travelling at full speed than a parked car did in 1970 from leaks.

My source for this remarkable statistic was Johan Norberg's 2006 book När människan skapade världen. In a translation he sent me it reads:

nterview in the Guardian today:

"If people are all the same underneath, how has society changed so fast and so radically? Life now is completely different to how it was 32,000 years ago. It's changed like that of no other species has. What's made that difference? Clearly our genes haven't changed; this process has happened far too fast for genetic change. My answer, bringing together my evolutionary knowledge and a lot of economic reading, is this: sex is to biology as exchange is to culture."

Here is why Craig Venter's new organism carries absolutely no fears for me: the Red Queen. Evolution is a treadmill.

People speak about artificial life forms getting loose and running amok. But that's not how life works. It's a jungle out there.

Nature is continually trying new life forms on a truly gigantic scale and testing them against each other. Very few get to take over the world even briefly and even they soon succumb to evolving predators, parasites and competitors.

John Tierney reviews The Rational Optimist in today's New York Times:

Every now and then, someone comes along to note that society has failed to collapse and might go on prospering, but the notion is promptly dismissed in academia as happy talk from a simpleton. Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list.

The Sunday Times printed an edited extract of the book on 16 May.

People love to talk about the energy industry in voices of gloom and doom. The oil's running out, the lights are going out, the pollution's getting worse. But pause to consider the good news. Like shale gas.

Over the past decade, a wave of drilling around the world has uncovered giant supplies of natural gas in shale rock. By some estimates, there's 1,000 trillion cubic feet recoverable in North America alone-enough to supply the nation's natural-gas needs for the next 45 years. Europe may have nearly 200 trillion cubic feet of its own.

Imagine a source of energy...

As own goals go, this was a stunning shot.

The quantity of cereals harvested in the world has trebled in 40 years [correction: nearly trebled in 50 years!], but the acreage planted to cereals has hardly changed at all.

(graph from my book)

My good friend the evolutionary biologist and expert on old age, Tom Kirkwood, has made a splash in my local newspaper, The Newcastle Journal, by writing to all three British party leaders to ask them to emphasise the positive rather than the negative aspects of people living longer.

Our studies are revealing high levels of capability and good quality life among people who are well into their 80s. They are not all in poor health needing high levels of care. Indeed, many view their health as 'excellent' and still live highly independent lives.

I point out in The Rational Optimist that the average lifespan has increased by a third during my lifetime; life expectancy is increasing globally by 5 hours a day. Kirkwood's Changing Age Charter, like my book, says:

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a horror, for people and for wildlife. It will surely cause huge damage. It is a reminder that for all the talk of global impacts, the worst environmental crises are still local ones.

But it is worth pausing to reflect how rare such terrible oil spills have now become. Here is the data on world tanker spills over the past 40 years:

I've admired Robert Bryce's work since he did such a great job of exposing the biofuel boondoggle inGusher of Lies.

Now he has a new book, which I have just kindled, on the myths of green energy, called Power Hungry.

He summarises his argument in the Washington Post. One fact that jumps out is how much worse the dependence on foregin powers green energy would be than even oil is:

Matt will be in New York giving a talk at the New York Academy of Sciences on the evening of 19 May. Speaking about `How prosperity evolves' and selling books. Feel free to spread the word.

Seth Roberts has read three new books about how emperors are often more naked than people tell them they are. I've read two of those books and had much the same reaction. The trust-the-experts inertia of the financial markets described by Michael Lewis in The Big Short is much like that in the climate debate described by Andrew Montford in The Hockey Stick Illusion. Roberts's third book is about Bernie Madoff.

I call these books The Emperor's New Clothes Trilogy. Their broad lesson:Sometimes the "best people" aren't right. Sometimes there's a point of view from which they're glaringly wrong. The Hockey Stick Illusion is about how Stephen McIntyre found this point of view. In No One Would Listen Markopolos found this point of view. In The Big Short several people found this point of view.

In Monty Python's immortal words:

Read this, taken from Roger Crowley's brilliant book Empires of the Sea:

Everyone employed chained labour -- captured slaves, convicts, and, in the Christian ships, paupers so destitute they sold themselves to the galley captains. It was these wretches, chained three or four to a foot-wide bench, who made sea wars possible. Their sole function was to work themselves to death. Shackled hand and foot, excreting where they sat, fed on meagre quantities of black biscuits, and so thirsty they were sometimes driven to drink seawater, galley slaves led lives bitter and short.

And this:

John Brockman's Edge site has lots of short essay-lets on what the ash cloud episode means. Maybe because of the way it was reported in the USA, remarkably few of the commentaries seem to get that it was a huge buearucratic over-reaction to a theoretical model and based on a zero-tolerance approach to ash that makes no sense. And it caused real economic and emtoional pain.

No coincidence that the models were built for radioactivity. Ash, chemicals, fallout and heat are things which are not linear in their risk. That is to say, a very low dose is not slightly more dangerous than no dose. It's no more dangerous. This is not true of burglars and smallpox viruses.

Here's my contribution to the Edge collection:

The always perceptive Indur Goklany has turned his attention to IPAT, the formula by which some environmentalists insist that human impact (I) gets worse if population (P), affluence (A) or technology (T) increases. This simple formula has become highly influential, but it fails to explain why human well being keeps increasing as P, A and T climb ever higher:

Tantalising clues have been emerging for some time from human genomes that Neanderthals may have contributed a few genes to posterity after all. That `we' mated with `them' occasionally.

The clues come in the form of widely differing DNA sequences that seem to converge on common ancestors that lived long before modern human beings came out of Africa 80,000 years ago or so.

There is good reason to be cautious -- it is possible that it just means lots of very distantly Africans joined the migration -- but now it seems a tipping point is being reached in the debate. The latest study of 600 microsatellite (fingerprint) sequences from 2,000 people is being interpreted as evidence of two separate episodes of genetic mixing between Neanderthals (or heidelbergensis) and ex-African `moderns'. SeeNeanderthals may have interbred with humans.