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has been published that the Great Barrier Reef is not in trouble
from climate change. The effects of bleaching are short-lived and
reversible. When I said this in my book, I was patronised from a
great height by a bunch of marine biologists in New Scientist. Will
they, and New Scientist, now apologise? As I keep saying, coral
reefs are indeed under threat from man-made problems -- pollution,
overfishing, run-off, but climate change is the least of their
worries. Here's the abstract of Osborne et al's paper in PLOS
Coral reef ecosystems worldwide are under
pressure from chronic and acute stressors that threaten their
continued existence. Most obvious among changes to reefs is loss of
hard coral cover, but a precise multi-scale estimate of coral cover
dynamics for the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is currently lacking.
Monitoring data collected annually from fixed sites at 47 reefs
across 1300 km of the GBR indicate that overall regional coral
cover was stable (averaging 29% and ranging from 23% to 33% cover
across years) with no net decline between 1995 and 2009.
Subregional trends (10-100 km) in hard coral were diverse with some
being very dynamic and others changing little. Coral cover
increased in six subregions and decreased in seven subregions.
Persistent decline of corals occurred in one subregion for hard
coral and Acroporidae and in four subregions in non-Acroporidae
families. Change in Acroporidae accounted for 68% of change in hard
coral. Crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci)
outbreaks and storm damage were responsible for more coral loss
during this period than either bleaching or disease despite two
mass bleaching events and an increase in the incidence of coral
disease. While the limited data for the GBR prior to the 1980's
suggests that coral cover was higher than in our survey, we found
no evidence of consistent, system-wide decline in coral cover since
1995. Instead, fluctuations in coral cover at subregional scales
(10-100 km), driven mostly by changes in fast-growing Acroporidae,
occurred as a result of localized disturbance events and subsequent
Here's what i wrote in my book.
Walter Russell Mead is always worth reading. Now he has written
a two-part essay on Al Gore and the climate debate (part one; part two) that is, I think, very perceptive.
It is angry, hard-hitting, and I don't agree with everything in it,
but it somehow gets to to the core of the issue in a way that so
much other commentary has not. This is the sort of old-fashioned
polemic from somebody with historical perspective that has been
lacking on this subject. Here's his conclusion:
The green movement's core tactic is not to
"hide the decline" or otherwise to cook the books of science.
Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and
obviously impractical political program in the authority of
science. Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety
construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the
greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first
century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.
The Rational Optimist is one of 13 books long-listed for the Royal
Society Book prize for science books. If I make it to the
shortlist, this will be my fifth time on this shortlist. (I have
yet to win, though!)
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal is on cancer and evolution by natural selection:
Last week the American Cancer Society reported that death rates
from cancer are falling steadily, at an annual rate of about 1.9%
in men and 1.5% in women. A study published this week by the
University of Colorado found that most seniors who died after being
diagnosed with breast cancer actually lived long enough to have
died of something else.
Prevention explains much of the decline in cancer fatalities,
especially the drop in smoking. As for treatment, the most
promising new options harness the very force that makes cancer so
stubbornly virulent in the first place: evolution.
Here is an op-ed I wrote for today's Australian newspaper:
POLLYANNA is a fool; Cassandra was wise. As a
self-proclaimed "rational optimist" who argues that the world has
been getting better for most people and that the future is likely
to be better still, I am up against a deep prejudice towards
pessimism that dominates the intelligentsia. As John Stuart Mill
put it, "not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who
despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons
as a sage".
What is more, pessimism has become a hallmark of the Left,
chiefly because it justifies activism. Once upon a time
conservatives lamented the way the world had gone to the dogs since
the golden age (and some still do), while socialists championed
growth, technology and innovation to liberate the working
My latest Mind and Matter column for the Wall
Street Journal is on how the future turns out:
Last month a crash dummy flew to 5,000 feet above ground level
in a personal jet pack. The inventor, New Zealander Glenn Martin,
has spent decades on the project and is ready to start selling the
device for $100,000 each next year. The gasoline-driven machine can
stay aloft for 30 minutes, thanks to what is, in effect, a pair of
large leaf-blowers. A parachute provides partial reassurance if
something should go wrong.
Mr. Martin's achievement is a reminder that, though we often
underestimate the progress of a technology, sometimes we
overestimate it. Back in the 1950s it seemed almost obvious that by
the 21st century jet packs would be ubiquitous and routine aids to
travel. They featured in sci-fi novels and comics and television
series like "Lost in Space." A time-traveler who arrived from that
era might be impressed by our Internet and mobile phones but amazed
at our lack of working jet packs.
The Rational Optimist has been short-listed for the Samuel
Johnson prize for the best non-fiction book of 2010.
One German organic farm has killed twice as many people as the
Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Gulf Oil spill
My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall
Street Journal is about the precautionary principle as exemplified
by the German e coli outbreak, which has now killed 29. Less
precaution about new technology might have meant fewer deaths:
A technology that might have prevented contaminated produce from
infecting thousands of Germans with E. coli was vetoed-by
Germany-11 years ago for use in the European Union. Irradiating
food with high-voltage electrons is a process that can kill
bacteria on or in solid objects, just as pasteurization can kill
them in liquid foods.
I have an article in The Conversation, an Australian
I missed this news last month. For the second time in
history, human beings have eradicated a disease altogether. This
time it is rinderpest, which people cannot get, only cattle so it's
not such big news as smallpox or (soon?) polio.
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street
Journal is about what happens when hoaxers own up and nobody
believes them. In the interest of space, I had to leave on the
cutting room floor my favourite, though fictional, example. In The
Life of Brian, Brian insists he is not the Messiah. A woman in the
crowd then shouts: ``Only the true Messiah denies his
Here's the column:
I have written the following review of Tim Harford's book
Adapt, for Nature magazine:
Charles Darwin's big idea - that blind trial and error
can progressively build a powerful simulacrum of purposeful design
- got pigeonholed under biology. Yet it always had wider
implications in economics, technology and culture. Darwin probably
drew some elements of his bottom-up thinking from the political
philosophers of the Scottish enlightenment, notably Adam Smith and
Adam Ferguson. Biology is now
returning the favour.
Books such as Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From (Allen
Lane, 2010), Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants (Viking Books,
2010) and Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology (Free Press,
2009) are suffused with concepts from natural selection, as is my
own, The Rational Optimist (Fourth Estate, 2010). Tim Harford's
Adapt follows this tradition, focusing on the key role of failure -
the 'error' in trial and error - in economic and social
I have the following op-ed in today's Times:
Oxfam's chief executive, Dame Barbara
Stocking, claimed this week in a BBC interview that there will
"absolutely not be enough food" to feed the world's population in a
few decades' time.
Such certainty about the future is
remarkable, so I downloaded Oxfam's new "report" with interest.
Once I got past the fundraising banners, I found a series of
assertions that there is a food crisis caused by failures of
government "to regulate, to correct, to protect, to resist, to
invest, which means that companies, interest groups and elites are
able to plunder resources and to redirect flows of finance,
knowledge, and food". Oxfam is calling for "a new global
governance" - effectively the nationalisation of the world food