I’m a cimate change sceptic: I think there are huge uncertainties (good and bad) about the phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming and much will be revealed as the current generation of adults refuses to do much to stop adding carbon to the atmosphere.
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Politics and campaigns / TV and Radio on 24 January 2011. No comments.
Yeah, so OK, BBC1′s delicious, mostly youthful Countryfile didn’t actually say that the alleged world food crisis would be solved by British allotmenteers. But… More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Handling protest on 10 January 2011. One comment.
The case against six protestors collapsed today in the wake of an extraordinary saga involving an erstwhile undercover policeman. Even now, early in the story’s unfolding, it is worth saying that in principle the police are probably right to operate undercover amongst protestors, even at considerable expense. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / TV and Radio on 8 November 2010. No comments.
Stephen Fry has visited the coastline and the waters of the US’s Gulf of Mexico and declared them to be, well, what? The victims of a spill, obviously. Maybe even the victim of the clean-up, for all we know. But not, he feels, the victim of any obvious post-accident wickedness or folly on BP’s part. That was, I think, the take-away message of Stephen Fry and the Great American Oil Spill (BBC2, 7 November 2010). But the interest of the programme is not limited to Fry’s being fairly sensible. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Politics and campaigns / TV and Radio on 7 September 2010. No comments.
RH, the BBC’s environment analyst, promised us a soul-searching assessment of his track record in reporting climate change over 20 years. Here’s a rather unenthusiastic assessment of his assessment. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Politics and campaigns on 3 September 2010. No comments.
Climate change politics is creeping into a kind of inevitable realism. (If you will forgive me, I’ll mention that I have argued for nearly 25 years that it would, sooner or later.) It is becoming clearer that it is now legitimate and necessary to say that there will be no silver bullet. Bjorn Lomborg’s new book (discussed in 2 new Guardian prepublication pieces, here and here) looks like helping quite a bit. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Politics and campaigns / TV and Radio on 30 August 2010. No comments.
This show sounded like a major apologia and a minor mea culpa from the BBC’s chief climate change analyst . It was, though, mostly depressingly familiar. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Economic crisis / Politics and campaigns on 25 July 2010. No comments.
I was asked to appear on Radio 4′s special programme BP: Beyond the horizon and the Macondo disaster. Would it transform the firm and the oil business? I’m clinging to the idea that it won’t much, but with one big caveat. Here’s the crib I prepared…. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Politics and campaigns on 15 June 2010. No comments.
It’s been a spectacularly bad few days for BP. Things looks set to get a bit worse. But they may yet turn out less than apocalyptic. Without shouting the odds, here’re some thoughts. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change / Politics and campaigns / RDN's media cribsheets on 3 May 2010. No comments.
I went on the BBC morning news show to say that the BP/Transocean Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico (a) might be dreadful but (b) would be the first such celebrity event to be an ecological disaster if it is one. More »
Posted by RDN under Climate change on 12 February 2010. No comments.
Drawing on one aspect of Stewart Brand’s new Whole Earth Discipline, this is a rather dense (mercifully short) note about the weakness of most discussion about the merits of action on climate change. More »
