Something is rustling in the long grasses of Europe. It is called miscanthus, a variety of elephant grass which is being tested as a possible 'green' way of producing energy. One of its features is that it achieves high yields on little fertilizer. BBC science reporter Jonathan Amos reports from the Dublin conference at which it was announced.

Burning biomass is broadly neutral in terms of its emissions of carbon dioxide, the major gas thought responsible for warming the planet. "As the plant grows it is drawing carbon dioxide out of the air," explained Professor Steve Long, from the University of Illinois. "When you burn it, you put that carbon dioxide back, so the net effect on atmospheric CO2 is zero.

The plant itself, at 4m (about 13 ft) high is being tested in varieties yielding 60 tonnes of dry material per hectare, five times today's typical yield. Prof Mike Jones told the British Association's Festival of Science that, grown on 10 percent of Europe’s useful land, it could generate 9 percent of Europe’s electricity.

These are big numbers. They may be above the best which can be realistically expected from wind farms at current progress, and provide yet another example of the ingenuity which is going into developing new energy sources. Currently high oil prices will provide a real boost to this type of research, encouraging us to find alternatives far more readily than any inter-governmental diktats or NGO exhortations.

True, it doesn't make us live more simply: if it works it simply gives us a renewable source of electricity. Europe at present grows many crops which are environmental unfriendly and unpleasant because of the fertilizers and pesticides they need. CAP subsidies and tariffs mean that this activity denies poorer countries the ability to gain wealth by selling us their crops. So roll on miscanthus. It even looks quite pretty, too.

Those who follow the politics of the climate debate will be expecting Hurricane Katrina to be used to confirm catastrophic climate warming.

James K. Glassman says [Canada’s National Post, September 02, 2005 ] that one of the first out of the traps was, "Sir David King, the British government's Chief Scientific Advisor [who] warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina." The New York Times, says: "Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity [sic] is because of global warming."

But scientists say the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean.” The recent onslaught "is very much natural," said William M. Gray, Professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University.

What about frequency, though? The web site of the National Hurricane Center tells us that:

Giant hurricanes are rare - and they are not increasing. To the contrary. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3, 4, 5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged nine per year. In the 1960s, there were six such storms; in the 1970s, four; in the 1980s, five; in the 1990s, five; and in 2001-04, there were three. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

The science of sea temperature and level is still evolving, and scientists have long pointed to a disparity that showed the atmosphere's lowest layer, the troposphere, had not warmed as much as the surface - contrary to greenhouse theory and model results. Dr Roy Spencer (U of Alabama) tells us:

This discrepancy between the UAH satellite LT trends and the surface thermometer trends has caused some consternation, since atmospheric physics suggests that sustained warming at the surface should be amplified with height in the troposphere, not reduced.

Hurricane Katrina has been a terrible tragedy, and may teach us to be better prepared for what nature throws our way. But to suggest it is man-made looks only like an attempt by interested parties to use it to their advantage.

Prof Stephen Salter, the Edinburgh engineer who was among the first to harness wave power for electricity, has proposed a new way of dealing with global warming. Paul Lamarra reports (Sunday Times) that the technique

..would involve using a fleet of small boats to produce the fine spray. As the water evaporated, tiny particles of salt would be carried into low-lying stratocumulus clouds by rising air currents. The salt would whiten the clouds, making them more reflective, and also create more water droplets, further reducing the amount of sun rays penetrating the atmosphere.

Prof Salterss claim is that a 4.5 percent increase in the reflectivity of one third of the earth’s clouds will be sufficient to negate all the forecast effects of global climate change.

Initially 500 unmanned radio-controlled boats, costing £1m each, would be deployed off the west coast of Africa and west of Peru, where the lumpy stratocumulus clouds are most prevalent. The 70ft-tall vessels, placed 25 miles apart, would be tracked by satellite. The forward movement of the boats, driven by wind-powered rotors, would turn underwater turbines that would create a field of static electricity. Water sucked into the rotors would hit the electrostatic field, creating the fine mist of seawater.

The technique sounds exotic, but Prof Salter believes it is both practical and cost-effective. The government is aware of his ideas and considering them, said an Environment Dept spokesman. The idea seems worth testing. The cost is tiny, compared to compliance with Kyoto and some other alternatives. Strangely, the coverage did not feature the ritual denunciations from environmentalist groups who oppose any alternatives to Kyoto, and are particularly critical of technological solutions which do not require us to live more simply. No doubt that will come later.

"Americans are the world's greatest polluters"

It seems that for many in the environmental movement, the actual defense of Gaia has taken a back seat to a more important objective; specifically, to attack the capitalist economic system in general, and, in particular, its American exemplar. Interestingly, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore agrees, saying: "The environmental movement has been hijacked by political activists who are using green rhetoric to cloak agendas that have more to do with anti-corporatism and class warfare than with ecology or the environment."

Of course, given the ostensible raison d’être of organizations like Greenpeace and the WWF, attacks upon America can't be couched in blatantly political terms, but must be presented in environmental ones - hence the oft-cited contention that "America is the world's largest polluter". It's common to see the above statement subtly modified into something like "Americans are the world's greatest polluters," a construction that conveniently facilitates the desired demonization of unconcerned, greedy, SUV-driving Americans happily despoiling the air, land and water. In light of the image thus created, it's instructive to examine some actual data.

As far as water pollution is concerned, according to World Bank data on freshwater pollution based on a standard water-treatment test for the presence of organic pollutants, water in the US is significantly less polluted than the worldwide average. In fact, levels of these pollutants in UK rivers and lakes are approximately three times those in the US, which also boasts cleaner water than countries like Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, France and the Netherlands, to name just a few. Odd, given the pernicious presence of "the world's greatest polluters".

With regard to air pollution, the US ranks 114th in the world (first being the worst) with respect to urban sulphur dioxide concentration (the UK figure is about 33% higher), 63rd in ozone-depleting CFC consumption, 45th in urban NO2 concentration, and 13th in NOx emissions per unit of populated land area (the UK value is more than twice as high).

Of course, the greatest concern at present has to do with emissions of so called greenhouse gases. Interestingly, according to recent figures from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the US is not the largest per capita offender here, either. Nor is it second. Among the industrialised nations considered, those positions go to Australia and Canada, respectively. In fact, the average Australian emits some 30% more than his American counterpart (the Canadian figure is only slightly higher than that of the US). Another report (PDF) - which places Canadian per capita emissions at a level just under those of the US, those of Australia again far and away the highest - points out that, when measured per unit of GDP, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Czech Republic and Poland are all greater emitters.

I can only attribute the fact that one rarely encounters vituperative attacks on the Australian emissions champions, or on the Canadian runners up, to the political agenda described above.

Finally, in light of the frequently repeated accusation, it's interesting to note that, according to the OECD Working Group on Environmental Information and Outlooks, only two countries (the Netherlands and Austria) spend more than the US on pollution control and abatement (measured as a percentage of GDP).

But don't expect facts like these to be reported by the likes of Greenpeace - they're too busy pursuing anti-capitalist, anti-American agendas of the kind that so disturb their own founder.

(Scott Burgess writes here).

The Telegraph's science editor, Roger Highfield, reports on the strange disappearance of what was hailed as the world’s worst leakage of genetically modified crops into regular strains.

Four years ago, researchers reported finding cobs of genetically modified maize in Oaxaca, Mexico, suggesting that GM maize (corn) from the US had invaded a traditional maize variety.

This contamination was loudly trumpeted by anti-GM campaigners, even though the GM variety had no adverse effects on people. What happened then was strange. The magazine Nature disowned the original paper by researchers at the University of California in Berkeley.

The paper had sparked a protest to Nature by 100 biologists and was disowned by the Mexican government after its scientists could not repeat the experiment. The anti-GM lobby portrayed the row as an attempt to discredit the research and as part of a biotech industry vendetta.

The story becomes stranger. A two-year study by Ohio State University researchers, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds there has been no spread of GM strains into native crops.

The researchers gathered more than 153,000 seeds from 870 maize plants in 125 fields in Oaxaca, for the first survey of foreign "transgenes" in native varieties, and found no evidence of contamination. The finding surprised the researchers, said Prof Snow, because millions of tons of GM grain were imported from the US each year for processed food and animal feed.

It all makes the findings of the original Berkeley study seem extraordinary. What was claimed as the worst incident of GM contamination has disappeared into thin air. The refutation might not get quite the coverage the original scare generated, however.

Roger Highfield, the Telegraph's science editor, reports on the use of solar power by the Weizman Institute to generate hydrogen

The institute, working with colleagues in Switzerland, France and Sweden on the EU-backed project, used sunlight to heat a metal ore, such as zinc oxide, to about 1,200° Celsius in the presence of charcoal. This split the ore, releasing oxygen and creating gaseous zinc, which was then condensed to a powder. The powder was later allowed to react with water, yielding hydrogen to be used as fuel and zinc oxide, which was recycled in the solar plant.

The significance of the development lies in the use of renewable, non-polluting energy to produce hydrogen. Critics of the hydrogen economy point out that most hydrogen is produced by expensive processes involving the use of polluting fossil fuels. Some have suggested that only nuclear energy can produce 'clean' hydrogen, and although the nuclear option is winning support, it is still far from popular among many environmentalists. Some of them regard the hydrogen economy as a distraction from what they see as the need to cut down on growth, transport, and other energy-using activities.

The construction of commercial plants using the new process could come in six to eight years. It fits squarely with the recent US-led initiative to co-operate in developing technology to reduce emissions and dependence on fossil fuels. The recent G8 communiqué promised development of hydrogen-powered vehicles.

The new process may make only a small contribution, but it is a good indicator, and there will undoubtedly be others. The supply of some natural resources may be limited, but human ingenuity seems unbounded.

Enoch Mutabaazi reports from Kampala, Uganda, about boys who earn a precarious and unpredictable living collecting scrap metal, and about the dealers to whom the boys sell whatever metal they find. It's a difficult business. Fluctuating prices, caused by such things as shipments of imported higher quality scrap metal, are a constant worry for all concerned. But at least it's a real business, which turns a potential resource that would otherwise rust away into nothing into an actual resource of real value.

Compare the metal recycling of Kampala with the kind of recycling that Westminster City Council wants its residents to perform.

By recycling your rubbish you can help to protect and improve our environment. Recycling means that items normally disposed of in landfill sites (large holes in the ground) or burnt in incineration plants can be reprocessed and remade into many useful products. Every item you recycle makes a difference.

Which makes me wonder why we are not being offered any money, even pennies, to do all this recycling. If us dividing up our rubbish into separate categories is so valuable, someone ought to be making money out of it. So, share some of this money with us, if you want us to share the work.

Westminster has statutory recycling targets set by government. Our targets are to achieve a recycling rate of 12% in 2003/4 and 18% by 2005/6. In Westminster the targets relate to household rubbish and street litter.

"Statutory recycling targets." That doesn't sound like the kind of recycling that is rooted in economic reality, the way that metal recycling in Kampala is. This is not true resource conservation. This is a pagan religious ritual.

Not only is this ritual costly in itself. It also makes it unlikely that an economically sane rubbish recycling industry could ever soon re-emerge, in Westminster, or anywhere else in Britain where those statutory recycling targets hold sway.

(Brian Micklethwait writes here.)

Britain's green belt is 50 years old this week. Postwar prosperity meant there was a big demand for new housing, so the planners, in their infinite wisdom, decided to stop it. Rings were drawn on the map around our towns and cities, and within those 'green belts' no development was allowed, except by special and exceptional dispensation. Urban sprawl was, apparently, the new enemy.

This policy - like the rest of planning policy - has been a disaster. The reason why property is so expensive to buy or rent (especially in London and the South-East) is precisely because new building is strangled by this collar round our conurbations. That's why houses are becoming unaffordable, why our hotels are so expensive and so poky, why our shops have to charge such high prices, and why the supermarket aisles are so uncomfortably narrow.

Sure, a lot of people get some green fields to look at. Specifically, all those people who have to live miles out of town because they can't afford city rents any more, and who have to take the train every morning through this rustic museum. The trouble is, the green belt has expanded so much and commuters' travel times are now so long that they're usually too tired to look out of the window and enjoy it. Not that there's much to enjoy: all those EU subsidies to the barley barons make most of it look uninvitingly like Kansas anyway.

It's quite feasible to bring the countryside close to people without closing off vast rings of it to development. It's quite possible to develop large parts of the countryside without ruining it. But instead the bureaucrats of 50 years ago left us with the typical heavy-handed bureaucratic solution: draw a circle, stop any development the other side of it, put it back in the file, and don't inquire too deeply about the consequences.

In the week which saw the 2012 Olympics decision, the G8 conference and the first wave of London bombings, it was all too easy to miss the House of Lords report on The Economics of Climate Change. Neil Collins in the Telegraph draws attention to their findings, in particular their disquiet at the approach of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is deemed to be overtly political, rather than scientific.

This is what their lordships seem to have grasped in their little-noticed report. They conclude: "The Kyoto protocol makes little difference to rates of warming, and has a naive compliance mechanism which can only deter other countries from signing up to subsequent tighter emissions targets. We urge the Government to take a lead in exploring alternative 'architectures' for future protocols, based perhaps on agreements on technology and its diffusion."

Collins concludes, as I did, that the Kyoto Protocol has passed its high point, and will now quietly fade from the scene as the more practical US-led approach seeks technological ways of curbing emissions which do not require us to cut back on growth and development, or on wealth and job-creation. He concludes:

The Kyoto accord looks like yesterday's approach to yesterday's conception of tomorrow's problem.

Trees have a lot going for them. I had always thought their virtues included helping soil to retain water and nutrients, thereby preventing both drought and flooding. Added to this was their propensity to absorb and store atmospheric carbon, Not true, it seems. Two new reports, both featured in the current Economist, shatter both illusions.

The first, a four-year international study led by researchers at the University of Newcastle, in Britain, and the Free University of Amsterdam, identifies several myths about the link between forests and water. For example, in arid and semi-arid areas, trees consume far more water than they trap. And it is not the trees that catch sediment and nutrients, and steady the flow of the rivers, but the fact that the soil has not been compressed.

The report, published by Department for International Development, concludes that there is no scientific evidence that forests increase or stabilize water flow. Indeed, it suggests there should be restrictions on tree planting in some areas to prevent water loss.

The second paper, published in Nature, is from US and Brazilian scientists who have examined carbon retention. They found that trees are silently returning the carbon to the atmosphere after only 5 years, rather than storing it for decades or centuries.

Trees still have a lot going for them, even if they fail to deliver on water and carbon. We still value the look and the smell of a forest, and the texture of wood and leaves. They shelter abundant animal, bird and insect life, and provide shade and solace to travelers. So even if they are not the environmental magicians we once thought, they are still eminently worth having around.

This week's environment agreement between the US and five Asia-Pacific states sets a strong alternative to Kyoto. The surprise deal includes China and India, whose output is largely unaffected by Kyoto. The six countries in the new deal, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia and the US account for nearly half of world greenhouse gas emissions.

The pact will use new technology to cut greenhouse gases, and will see its signatories sharing cleaner technology with each other. Each country will set goals for emission reduction, and while there is no enforcement mechanism, neither are there measures which will threaten economic growth and employment. The BBC reminds us that

Both the US and Australia have refused to ratify Kyoto, which came into effect earlier this year, partly, they say, because big developing countries like India and China escape emissions limits. They have also made clear their concern that climate change should only be addressed without harming development or economic growth.

Thanks to a US-led initiative, there is now a valid alternative to the expensive and anti-growth policies enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol. This is exactly why the NGOs and the environmental lobby are already up in arms against it. Their agenda is essentially anti-technology, anti-business and anti-growth. One of its aims is to force us to 'live more simply.' The use of technological solutions by-passes their objectives.

It is now an easy prediction to make that this approach will dominate. Kyoto is unlikely to be renewed post 2012. In its place will be the rapid development and spread of innovative solutions which cut emissions and enable development to occur much more cleanly. The emphasis (and the rewards) will be for cleaner energy, with the result that nations will achieve emission cuts far deeper than the Kyoto targets, and at far less cost.

John Kay says in the Financial Times that President Bush is right regarding his assertions on climate at the recent G8 meeting at Gleneagles. Bush emphasized uncertainties on the science and the economics: Kyoto has large costs and negligible benefits for the US. Greenhouse gas controls that exclude developing countries are ineffective; while research and development on new technologies should take priority over emissions reduction targets.

Hopefully this heralds the beginning of the end for Consensus Science which might excusably be mistaken for conspiracy. Forecasts of catastrophic warming derive from contested computer models. Although some warming at the end of the 20 Century is observed in surface samples, weather satellites and balloons recorded cooling between 1940 and the mid seventies, leading popular scientists to warn of a new and overdue Ice Age. There has been no clear trend since.

Recent forecasts of rapid warming favoured by the Consensus depend on the hypothetical hockey stick which was used by the IPCC [2001] as evidence for anthropogenic global warming. It showed. a sharp recent temperature rise in the Northern hemisphere after a relatively flat trend for 1000 years. This model is now discredited. McIntyre and McKitrick [MM-2003] found the data had been manipulated. When MM recalculated temperatures with corrected data (but retaining the same methodology), they obtained quite a different temperature history, bearing no resemblance to the hockey stick (which can be fitted to random data). This debate has affected respected journals like Science and Nature, which are no longer willing to provide a forum for conflicting views.

Meanwhile the original data from which the hockey stick was derived cannot be extracted. Washington is currently split by the Congressional attempt to establish if research supported by public funds should be available to other scientists for independent verification.

The recent [6 July] but largely overlooked report on climate by the Economic Affairs Committee of Britain's House of Lords explains how science can be conflated with politics and so-called consensus used to justify advocacy. Once scientists lose their reputation for impartiality, the outlook is truly bleak.

There has to be a Harry Potter post, doesn’t there?

Greenpeace International is asking readers to boycott the US version of the latest tome and purchase the Canadian version instead. Encouraging the breach of copyright doesn’t sound all that friendly, nor does the idea that instead of buying books that have been trucked about in bulk one should insist upon a personal delivery from another country. Have these people never heard of book miles? The reason given is:

However, not all publishers are following this trend. Less progressive Harry Potter publishers like Scholastic in the USA have not responded to the challenge, and in fact ignored the 12,400 emails from customers who asked it to print 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' on ancient forest friendly paper. It seems they haven't been using Professor Trelawney's crystal ball enough.

"The US publisher Scholastic is one of the largest Harry Potter publishers globally," said our resident book wizard Judy Rodrigues. "If they had printed the book on 100 percent recycled paper, like Raincoast, its 10.8 million print run could have saved 217,475 mature trees."

Leave aside, for a moment, the fact that most virgin paper is made from trees especially grown for that use. Think, rather, about the wider issue of the use of resources. Would the use of recycled paper have meant the use of less resources in total than the use of virgin paper? How can we actually work this out? The best system we have, indeed the only method of working out such a complex calculation, is to look at prices, for markets do exactly that, tell us whether we are using resources in the most efficient manner possible.

As the National Geographic report on the matter states:

Markets Initiative says that it cost Raincoast some 5 percent more in production costs to use recycled paper—a cost that may be reflected in the Canadian edition's higher cover price.

The cost of paper is only one of the total production costs so we can be certain that the price difference between recycled and virgin paper is greater than 5 percent. Ergo, the use of recycled paper is a waste of wealth and resources.

So, Greenpeace International is urging us all to waste resources, become marginally poorer, in pursuit of their particular vision of the world. How nice of them to do that for us.

(Tim Worstall writes here.)

Europe may be losing its human population, perhaps 41 million within the next quarter-century, but bears, wolves and wild boar are taking their place. In one of the cheeriest ecological stories in years, Roger Boyes (of the Times) tells us that:

Wild boar are already ransacking dustbins on the outskirts of Berlin and bears are startling schoolgirls in Austria.

Wolves, too, are back, moving into the overgrown artillery ranges and exercise grounds abandoned by the Soviets in East Germany. French and Italian farmers have been confronted by wolves crossing the Alps, while in Slovenia children have to be taken to school by bus because of confrontations with brown bears, which are moving now into Austria.

Part of the return of these wild creatures is put down to people leaving the land for the cities, giving the animals space to move into.

Farmers' young sons are leaving and not returning, and their parents are selling up to subsidize their pensions. The new purchasers often find it more profitable under the Common Agricultural Policy to let the land run wild rather than farm it. Woodland is growing back.

That must be the only good thing currently attributed to the CAP. It is giving us a Europe fit for bears and wolves to live in. They will certainly do less harm to human beings than the CAP itself does.

The market is a hugely powerful tool. I’m all in favour of using it to solve our biggest problems. So I support tradeable pollution permits, like those for sulphur emissions introduced by George Bush Sr and described by Ben Macintyre in The Times this weekend.

As Macintyre says, the idea works. Which is why (in its own hopelessly bureaucratic and horse-trading way) the EU now has a trading system for industrial emissions of carbon.

So far so good. But I’m alarmed to see it reported that the UK government is seriously considering extending the carbon-trading principle to domestic households. Under this plan, each person would have to hand over a carbon ‘ration card’ – possibly the proposed new ID card – every time they filled up at the pumps, bought airline tickets, and so on. High users would have to purchase ration points from low users.

A kind of market, yes. But typical of those schemes beloved of zealots and government policy planners – superbly rational, but just plain daft. Impractical too: in a fluid society, with 26m people a year coming to the UK on short working visits, plus tourists, how are you going to get ration books out to everyone? And scary: the ink on the ID card bill is scarcely dry before zealots start dreaming up new ways of using it to make us live the way they want. What are they going to think of next? Rationing our calorie intake in order to combat obesity? Thanks, but I don’t really want to live in a society like that.

Climate change is both political and scientific. The political side attacks capitalism, globalization and the USA. The scientific side identifies previous glacial cycles including the present one which began 10,000 years ago. The Earth was warmer 1,000 years ago, and the natural part of present warming seems to dwarf human contribution. This does not stop us acting to influence it if we want to.

This is where the politics comes in. The prescription is to cut growth and economic activity and learn to live more simply. We should buy locally and travel less, trying to minimize our footprint on the planet. Any technological approach which seeks to minimize the consequences of growth by developing engines which pollute less, or which removes carbon from the atmosphere, is unacceptable because it bypasses the political agenda. This is where the US and George Bush enter the frame. Fraser Nelson (The Business) sums it up:

Bush has pledged to reduce US greenhouse gas intensities by 18% within 10 years, a tougher target than Kyoto-signing Britain, which has set a target for 12%. His White House is pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 500 tonnes over a decade a bigger saving than the rest of Europe put together.

The problem for activists is that the US is pursuing carbon capture technology, plus a scheme to capture and use waste methane for energy. Far from cutting economic growth, such measures should boost it, creating new markets for innovative solutions.

… by 2015, the Methane to Markets programme will have removed 1% of all greenhouse gases emitted by humans into the atmosphere. This is the environmental equivalent of closing down England’s entire road network, or shutting down 50 coal-fired power stations,

Part of the US agenda is avowedly to reduce its dependence of foreign oil, but part of it is resistance to being straitjacketed by a Kyoto Protocol which imposes such heavy costs for so tiny a result. Some reports suggest, to the fury of eco-activists, that the Gleneagles draft being considered will incorporate some of these developments. It looks increasingly as if the way forward will involve leaving Kyoto behind.

Will global warming, natural or otherwise, make life worse for humans? We have heard stories of fertile plains reduced to baking deserts, and of coastal and island communities submerged by rising sea levels.

Now Robert Matthews (Telegraph) reports on some scientists who are beginning to question those bleak prophecies, including some who think the changes may be beneficial. They suggest that a warmer earth brings benefits, and that humans can readily adapt to the changes.

Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at the University of London, points out that

"Cold is nearly always worse for everything - the economy, agriculture, disease, biodiversity". According to Prof Stott, times of historical prosperity have often been tied to unusually warm periods, such as the so-called Mediaeval Warm Period between 1100 and 1300. In contrast, the Little Ice Age between 1450 to 1890 was characterized by famines, pandemics and social upheaval.

Some cite the recent heat-waves as evidence of the lethal effects of global warming,

Yet a review published last year by scientists at the University of London pointed out a basic medical fact: in many countries, cold kills far more people each year than heat. For the kind of temperature rise predicted for the UK over the next 50 years, the team estimated that heat-related deaths would rise by about 2,000 a year - but that this figure would be dwarfed by a cut in cold-related deaths of 20,000.

The UK has been warned it faces a return of malaria, but analysis from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine concludes that changes in land use and socio-economic trends make the risk "highly unlikely".

Similarly, the dire warnings about world crop levels are now being countered by analysis which factors in human adaptability. Alternative crops can be planted.

Ironically, some of the benefits come from the growth-promoting effect of the very greenhouse gas now causing so much alarm: carbon dioxide. Global yields of wheat and rice are expected to rise by 18 per cent, while yields of clover - a key foodstuff for grazing animals - looks set to rise by 36 per cent. Global vegetation density seems to be benefiting already, with net gains in growth across the whole planet since the early 1980s. Even tropical forests and the Amazon are reported to be growing more luxuriant as CO2 levels rise.

Alarming predictions of 5 ft rises in sea levels have also been scaled back. The International Quaternary Association last year put the figure somewhere between 8in and zero, which could be adapted to. Millions downed or made homeless by flooding does not seem to be on the agenda, as the Inter governmental Panel on Climate Change now concedes. Human adaptability and inventiveness have hitherto often been left out of the equation.

Change and adaptation seem more likely than disaster if this is correct, but we must ensure that we generate sufficient economic growth and wealth to cope with the changes.

Environmentalism seems particularly prone to myths and symbols. Sometimes actions and attitudes which might be ineffective or counter-productive to the cause are praised because they are symbols of one’s commitment. One of these just took a dive.

Britain's pollution watchdog, the Environment Agency, has just concluded after a four-year study that disposable nappies are as environmentally friendly as washable ones. Valerie Elliot reports it in the Times.

The agency checked the environmental impacts of disposable nappies and compared them with real nappies washed at home and real nappies collected and delivered by a professional laundry. All three involved destruction of raw materials such as trees and plants, leading to a depletion of resources. All three contributed to global warming, from the air miles involved in flying in cotton to Britain from China, Pakistan and the United States, to the electricity used in washing and drying nappies at home; to the fuel used to collect and deliver clean nappies to a household; and to the methane produced from disposables that biodegrade in landfill sites.

And all the detergent and bleach which the cloth brigade leach into the environment does not help either. As for the disposable nappies in landfill sites, excavation done over 20 years on landfills reveals that they constitute a tiny fraction of the total, whereas telephone directories are ubiquitous.

The Environment Agency reported "little or no difference" between the alternatives. In the wake of this report it looks as though the real nappy officers appointed across the UK in the public jobs binge are themselves disposable.

Many who favour action to counter global warming cite the December Science paper by Dr Naomi Oreskes, which examined 1,000 papers and concluded that 75% backed the 'consensus' view that the warming is real and is man-made, with none dissenting. Some claim its findings as "unchallenged."

Robert Matthews (Telegraph) tells us why. Dr Benny Peisner of John Moores University at Liverpool conducted his own anlysis of the same 1,000 papers, and concluded that only one third backed the 'consensus' view, while only one per cent did so explicitly. Science refused to publish his paper on the grounds that the points he made had been "widely dispersed on the internet".

A spokesman for Science said Dr Peiser's research had been rejected "for a variety of reasons", adding: "The information in the letter was not perceived to be novel."

This means that the original paper remains “unchallenged.” There is more, though, Matthews tells us.

Dr Peiser is not the only academic to have had work turned down which criticises the findings of Dr Oreskes's study. Prof Dennis Bray, of the GKSS National Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, submitted results from an international study showing that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity. As with Dr Peiser's study, Science refused to publish his rebuttal. Prof Bray told The Telegraph: "They said it didn't fit with what they were intending to publish."

Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, said that after his team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.

This begins to establish a rather disturbing pattern in which only papers conforming to the 'man-made' view of global warming are printed, leaving others to talk of a 'consensus' in the scientific journals. One is left wondering why they should behave like this? It is not as if global warming were a religion with acolytes and heretics; it is supposed to be about science.

UK engineering firm Rolls Royce has announced plans to develop a fuel cell power source by 2008. Philip Aldrick reports that in collaboration with a Singapore consortium, the maker of aircraft engines is investing $100m to create a portable power source which generates 1 megawatt, or enough for about 200 households. It could be used for office buildings and small businesses, and should be available before the end of 2008.

This is small scale, of course, but the output is environmentally friendly and uses renewable sources; and some analysts would regard more dispersed power production as less vulnerable to disruption of supply. And once the engineering problems have been solved, the way may be open for production on a larger scale.

This technology seems to offer rather more promise than do windmills. It has less unpleasant environmental impact, and can be located where the energy is needed. It will not be welcomed by those who oppose economic growth and want us all made to limit our desires and to live more simply. Other environmentalists should welcome it, however, since it offers the prospect of clean, renewable and efficient energy. Not surprisingly, Rolls Royce shares rose 2% on the announcement.

Conservationists have supported wind farms as a renewable source of energy which does not damage the environment like the burning of fossil fuels. They must be overjoyed to read about the new power station that will put 36 wind turbines on a 2,000ft-high plateau in the Monadhliath Mountains on Dunmaglass Estate. The developers, Renewable Energy Systems, have issued a 300-page environmental impact study on the plans.

The study states that up to 11 golden eagles could be killed in collisions with turbines and suggests that the wind farm, covering 4 square miles, will have a long-term impact "on the potential of this area as a nursery ground for future replacement breeding birds in the region". It says that the 360ft turbines, higher than Big Ben, will be visible from Loch Ness and from the Ptarmigan visitor centre in the Cairngorm National Park, some 20 miles away — before concluding that the proposal will have "few adverse environmental effects".

Fortunately some good comes from the proposal, apart from the admittedly expensive wind-generated energy. Dunmaglass is the Highland holiday home of Sir Jack Hayward, a Bahamas-based property developer, who will make an estimated £9 million for letting Renewable Energy Systems build on his land. The developers are set to make profits of more than £120 million.

The latest threatened disaster is a giant volcano. A BBC documentary showed how this could cause mass extinctions, as similar ones may have done before. This comes hot on the heels of a pandemic of avian flu which scientists tell us could claim two million lives in Britain alone. Some scientists warn that another ice age is overdue, although many more have persuaded governments to commit billions of dollars against the disaster threatened by global warming.

Over-population has passed its best, though some still warn of the catastrophe it will bring. A world stripped of its resources by our own greedy generation threatens a bleak future. Meanwhile money is already being spent on early warning systems to detect asteroids and comets which might consign us to the same extinction they meted out to the dinosaurs. Some want even more spent on preparations to destroy or divert any earth-bound objects. Solar radiation coming through ozone holes might get us before then, as might other cosmic catastrophes. It might be touch and go whether we get flooded before the world runs out of water.

Disregarding for a moment the possibility that these might be elaborate pay claims by scientists, with each group anxious to secure research grants for its own discipline, the question arises as to how we can possibly afford to deal with all of these potential disasters. We can't, of course; we have to choose.

One possible approach would be to nominate what we can reasonably afford, then invite scientific groups to bid for it. They could present their case competitively, with resources being awarded to those who make the best case. There could be an independent panel like the Motion Picture Academy to decide the winner at an annual awards ceremony, or the public at large could vote, maybe eliminating threats one by one in a kind of Catastrophe Pop Idol until the winner was chosen. It would certainly make for gripping television, and generate employment for graphic artists for years to come.

An old friend of the Adam Smith Institute, The Honourable Ian Campbell - Australia's Cabinet Minister in charge of Environment and Heritage - is in London for talks with British and other government representatives.

The subject is climate change and Kyoto - to which Australia (along with a number of those who will be coming to the talks) is not a signatory. But, says Campbell, Australia is doing a lot of other things which will arguably help the world climate more than the hugely-costly Kyoto protocol.

Mr Campbell's first stop in London was to see Dr Madsen Pirie (left) and Dr Eamonn Butler (centre) at the ASI HQ in Westminster.

Wind farms in Britain have enemies. They are alleged to kill birds, to ruin scenic views, and to impose higher energy costs on the economy. They have supporters, too, in that they are a symbol (if not a practical aid) of a commitment to renewable energy.

They have other friends, too, reports Mark Macaskill in the Sunday Times.

Some of Scotland’s richest landowners are preparing to share in a £200m wind farm bonanza. Nicholas Oppenheim, the leisure tycoon, heads a list of 20 lairds set to cash in on the switch to green energy by allowing their land to be used to house hundreds of giant turbines.

Oppenheim will earn about £30m from a wind farm with 133 turbines each 125m high on his Eisgein estate in Lewis. John Dalrymple-Hamilton will share in £13m from the 52 turbines on Hadyard Hill, Ayrshire. The Earl of Moray will get £20m from 49 turbines on his Doune estate.

Scotland’s 20 current wind farms will soon add 35 already approved, with hundreds pending, and many of Scotland’s richest landowners stand to make a great deal of money. Their ancestors removed the people and put sheep there instead. Now they are putting windmills on the land. They must be gratified to know that the wind up there blows somebody some good.

As part of its sustainable energy programme, the UK government is set to announce a scheme to promote clean energy in developing countries by paying into a fund every time a minister or civil servant takes a trip by air. The idea is to offset the climate change impact of the carbon dioxide emissions from flying. Three government departments will be involved initially, and payments for their flights could raise £0.5m a year.

This is very generous of them, or, as we taxpayers prefer to put it, very generous of us. It is not their money, but ours, being spent on this piece of gesture politics.

One of our readers thinks there is a much better idea: once in flight they could be hurled from the plane, thus relieving the world of the gas they produce while they're pontificating.

Britain's environment minister, Elliot Morley, complains that fly-tipping -- illegal dumping of rubbish by roadsides or on farmland and waste land –- is now unacceptably rife, and that one incident occurs every 35 seconds.

And why is that? Well, it was Mr Morley's own government that raised the charges on the official dumps at landfill sites. (They said it was to cut the amount of land being consumed by landfill, but of course it's a nice little earner too.) And it was the European Union, which Morley's party leader Tony Blair finds so irresistible, that raised the cost of disposing legally of car tyres, refrigerators, and other "environmentally unfriendly" goods.

The economics isn't hard: when the price of doing something goes up, people usually do less of it. If we make it expensive for people to dispose of waste legally, you'll get tyre mountains, fridge mountains, and fly-tipping. If governments hadn't wrecked the education system too, perhaps our ministers would understand these simple things.

Britain's largest energy companies -- and the unions working in them – are telling the government that the lights could be going out in just three years' time unless there is a change in its policy.

Basically, the government hasn't made up its mind what environmental standards it is going to impose on gas and coal power stations. So new investment in plant has dried up. There's no point in building, extending, or upgrading a power station today if the government is going to declare it illegal tomorrow.

And even so, the legislation which the government has been mulling over is the toughest in Europe. And if the rules make UK power stations uneconomic, the large power groups might just conclude that they would be better off leaving Britain to it and choosing to invest elsewhere.

Hence the industry's agitation. But there is another problem that could lead to power cuts in a few years too. The government decided to run down Britain's nuclear capacity. But the idea that wind and wave power can fill the gap is just plain daft. (And many protestors are now pointing out that ugly wind farms in rural areas and the pylons needed to transport their energy are hardly environmentally friendly either.) Frankly, unless we start thinking about new nuclear build -- and clear the planning blight from coal and gas generation -- it's going to be a cold, dark winter in 2008.

From the Guardian:

Residents of Croydon, south London, have been told that the microchips being inserted into their new wheely bins may well be adapted so that the council can judge whether they are producing too much rubbish.

If the technology suggests that they are, errant residents may be visited by officials bearing advice on how they might "manage their rubbish more effectively".

In the shorter term the microchips will be used to tell council officers how many of the borough's 100,000 bins the refuse collectors have emptied and how many have been missed.

Let's look at the background: Croydon taxpayers are being fleeced by Croydon Council. Taxpayers have been given some of Britain's largest council tax rises. In 2003 alone, council tax rose by 27.3%. The council has shown it loves expensive projects. This is another project that will raise council tax.

It's a legitimate aim for the council to know how many bins haven't been emptied. After all, they choose which company gets the contract to do rubbish collection. Then again, having a single, monopoly provider of domestic waste collection is not the most efficient way of collecting rubbish. It is vastly better than pre-1980s state monopoly system, and the current system was the result of a publication by the Adam Smith Institute arguing for contracting out of local government services. But it has been shown in the USA that the best system is to have competing rubbish collection companies from which individuals select.

The really worrying aspect about Croydon Council's idea is that the technology will be used to spy on and lecture people about the amount of rubbish they produce. Using the price mechanism to reduce waste would be much less intrusive. For example, Westminster City Council charges businesses for each binbag used. A system for domestic waste which charged people based on the quantity of their waste would also have the benefit of being the most equitable way of charging for rubbish.

(Found via White Rose.)

A report on wind-power commissioned by the German government has been sent back for 're-editing' after it reached unwelcome conclusions, according to Tony Paterson (Sunday Telegraph). Germany plans to double its current 15,000 turbines in 10 years. But Paterson tells us:

The findings of the unpublished report were leaked to Der Spiegel magazine last week. They suggest that if Germany presses ahead with its plan to double the number of wind turbines, annual energy costs for consumers will rise from €1.4 billion to €5.4 billion (£1 billion to £3.7 billion), increasing the average annual household bill by €44 by 2015. The report also states that the government will have to spend an extra €1.1 billion on laying almost 600 miles of new cable and that power plants will have to be replaced or adapted to cope with the inherently large fluctuations in wind-derived energy.

More damningly, the report concludes that the same reduction in 'greenhouse' emissions could be achieved at far less cost by installing modern filters at fossil fuel plants. Meanwhile in Britain David Harrison reports on the likely effect of proposed wind farms in parts of Humberside and South Yorkshire. Country views will be ruined, and property prices cut by a third, warn estate agents. But conservationists are also alarmed, Harrison reports:

Conservationists say, however, that the threat posed by the wind farms to some of Britain's finest wet moorland is even greater than the threat to the residents' quality of life. The wind farms will form a "ring of steel" around the sites, they say, blighting the landscape, damaging the habitat and leading to rare birds being killed by the turbines' propellers. The biggest fear is for the nightjar, whose population has been falling for several years and which is listed as a "priority bird" in the Government's bio-diversity action plan. Campaigners say that it could be extinct in the area within five years if the wind turbines are built. Thorne and the nearby Hatfield Moor contain thousands of rare plants and animals. Thorne Moors has more than 5,000 invertebrates and plants, including cotton grass, cranberry, bog rosemary and sundew.

The UK Government is pushing the development of wind farms in an attempt to reach its target of producing 10 percent of Britain's energy from renewable sources by 2010. Given the high energy costs of wind power, the negative effect on both human and animal life, and the availability of cheaper ways of achieving the same environmental effect, it has to be supposed that wind farms are being pushed for their totemic status. Perhaps they symbolize a commitment to the environment, regardless of whether they provide a net benefit.

Last week's eco-disaster story was Nature magazine's "biggest ever climate simulation" project. Using time on thousands of home computers, this (we were told) showed that "temperatures may rise by 11 degrees Celsius".

It showed nothing of the sort. In fact it was a research exercise to find out just how sensitive climate-model assumptions were to their eventual warming predictions. And the answer they found was: a lot. The researchers ran the model 2000 times, with slightly different assumptions in each case. They discovered, with some surprise that some (apparently unrelated) assumptions cancelled each other out, while others reinforced. Only the very highest guess suggested an 11C rise, while others actually predicted a fall. Most came out forecasting a rise of around 3.4C.

The media's coverage of this exercise, stoked up by the environistas, is just as naïve as when it cried doom over the "1.4C to 5.8C" rises predicted by the International Panel on Climate Change a few years back. But again, most of those simulations bunched around 2C, and 5.8C was only an extreme view.

This huge exercise has indeed found what it set out to find. Not that we are soon going to bake, nor even that the next ice age is on its way (though it inevitably must come sometime). But that the results of our climate models change when we change the assumptions. Surprise!

The environazis disperse this myth about peasant farmers being at one with nature. Sometimes the myth is so idyllic that I think they want us all to become peasant farmers. Anyway, the idea is that while big, grasping corporations are ruining the planet, if we just thought smaller and more rustic we could turn things round.

Wrong, says Matthew Parris in this week's Spectator. A former Conservative MP, he is now a journalist who derives much of his output from his long travels to developing countries all over the world. He is just back from Ethiopia, and says the idea that peasant farmers manage the land well is just risible. That is why he want to rid the planet of goats.

Goats? Yes, indeed. A herd of goats is a great asset for a family. They provide milk and meat, and more goats, which you can sell. The trouble is they eat anything that grows, and, wandering for miles in search of it, they don't care much whose land it's on. So if your neighbours are trying to raise crops, their best course would be to forget it before every last seedling has gone, down hoes, and get some goats of their own.

This, says Parris, has contributed to the desertification of many of the poorer countries he has visited. It utterly destroys the ecological balance across tens of millions of square miles. In his words:

The degradation of our planet owes as much to the poor as to the rich... A million small-scale farming operations satisfying individually modest needs can wreck a landscape and extinguish every competing variety of bird, animal, insect and plant life. Hunger is no steward of river, land and forest, and the poor may ravage their environment more cruelly than those of us who enjoy the luxury of treating outdoors as a kind of garden. Thus have the poor and their goats teemed beneath the radar of our environmental surveillance systems, and daily destroy more land than rising sea-levels will ever do.

Worth the urban romantics reflecting on. The environment is a luxury that the world's poorest can't afford to bother about. The only solution is to make the world's poor farmers rich. And - Bush is right - the only way to do that is to spread democracy, the free economy, and trade across the planet.

Many analysts have been taking a second look at nuclear power. The Nuclear Industry Association has jogged their thoughts with a MORI poll showing that 35% in Britain would support more nuclear stations, with 30% opposed (which, though hardly overwhelming, is down from 60% opposed). The economics of wind farms seem less secure, as do their environmental effects. And they need back-up when the wind doesn’t blow.

Environmentalists worry about storing radioactive waste, while economists wonder about the bottom line once the costs of decommissioning are factored in. Against this stand the claims that nuclear power does not increase atmospheric emissions, and is more proven and cost-effective than wind power.

France has gone 80% nuclear, and sells us power across the Channel. China and India rely 80% on fossil fuel power, with lots of new coal-burning stations. The UK was doing quite well on emissions targets by moving to natural gas power stations until the Labour government back-pedalled on that to slow down job losses in the coal industry.

The nuclear option, backed by some big-name conservationists such as James Lovelock and David Bellamy, seems to be gaining momentum. But Graham Searjeant, Financial Editor of the Times, doubts that the UK can do it, given EU rules, European politics, and a government more concerned with gestures than results.

An engaging article about Bjorn Lomborg by Giles Whittel is in the Jan 1st Weekend Review of the Times. The article covers the familiar ground of Lomborg's work on The Skeptical Environmentalist. What strikes one immediately is Whittel's view that Lomborg, furiously assailed with a passion rarely seen outside of politics and academe, has actually won, and thereby changed the world.

But unlike most contemporary thinkers, including the Nobel laureates with whom he increasingly fraternises, he can claim to have waded into one of the great arguments of the age, initially as a complete novice, and, well, won it.

It is possible for a single person to demolish one of the great myths of their times. Julian Simon whom I greatly liked and respected, did this with the argument that the world was running out of scarce resources. He also helped to kill the Population Time Bomb myth. As in a fairground shooting gallery, a new one pops up whenever one is shot down.

Lomborg's contribution has been to cast doubt upon the extent to which global warming is occurring because of human-generated emissions, and on whether measures like the Kyoto Protocol represent a sensible and effective use of resources. Michael Crichton’s State of Fear will probably help to spread Lomborg's doubts at a more popular level. Whittel says that Lomborg should no longer call himself an environmentalist because:

Environmentalists believe that protecting the natural environment has value in and of itself. Lomborg's entire outlook, by contrast, is based on putting people first.

...environmentalists would strive to protect the Amazon rainforest even if no human beings lived there and no medicinal plants grew there. Lomborg, apparently, would not.

"It turns out most people like other sorts of forest much better," he says airily. "Parents like open forest where you can see where the kids are playing. You also want signs to tell you what you're seeing... It's a very different kind of forest that most people actually want. You need a parking lot close by, that kind of stuff."

Lomborg has done environmentalists a tremendous service by showing them what happens when they cry wolf. But he's not one of them. He's on the other side now - the one that’s winning.

Whittel could be right. While many of the lemmings are still dashing headlong towards the cliff edge, spurring each other on and deriding those who question the direction, more and more are pausing to consider the alternatives.

The huge loss of life in the Indonesian tsunami disaster reminds us all of the terrible power of nature. The modest help we can give from afar looks sadly insufficient to the task of repairing the physical damage or relieving the human distress. All we can do is pause, reflect, and sympathize.

But no doubt the environmentalistas will soon be telling us that the whole world is open to coastal devastation like this unless we start doing more to enforce the Kyoto protocols and tackle global warming. But the lesson of Indonesia is the exact opposite.

The devastation was overpowering, yes. But the human cost is all the heavier because most of the countries affected are poor. Homes and workplaces weakly built; poor roads and telecommunications that make it hard to summon help or deliver it with speed and accuracy to where it is needed; inadequate medical and emergency services; too little education that could save lives.

It was the same in the Caribbean hurricanes earlier this year. Poor Haiti suffered enormous damage, with many killed and half its GNP wiped out. For rich Florida, hit by the same storm, it is basically an insurance claim. Homes and public infrastructure in Florida are more solidly built, storm planning is efficient, mobile phones are everywhere.

The real lesson is that we have to make the world richer. Because richer people can stand up to natural disasters better than poorer ones. We need trade, markets, peace, democracy, low taxes -- all the things that will deliver growth fast to the developing world. That is the way to save lives. Real lives that are being lost right now. Quite frankly, that will do more for the planet than the theoretical and far-off benefits of Kyoto.

Michael Crichton's new thriller, State of Fear, is about eco-terrorists who plot a series of natural disasters - earthquakes, underwater landslides, a tsunami - to prove that global warming is a threat to humanity. A ragtag band of scientists and lawyers uncovers the scheme.

At the end of the book the author sets out a five-page summary of his take on global warming, plus a 14-page bibliography of works supporting his views. Here are just a few of the points he makes in that summary, emphasizing his own uncertainty as well as general ignorance:

Atmospheric carbon is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause.

We are also in the middle of a natural warming trend that began about 1850 as we emerged from a four-hundred-year old cold spell known as the "Little Ice Age."

Nobody knows how much the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon.

Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man-made.

Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century.

I suspect that part of the observed surface warming will ultimately be attributable to human activity. I suspect that the principal human effect will come from land use, and that the atmospheric component will be minor.

There are many reasons to shift away from fossil fuels, and we will do so in the next century without legislation, financial incentives, carbon-conservation programs, or the interminable yammering of fearmongers.

I suspect the people of 2100 will be richer than we are, consume more energy, have smaller global population, and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don’t think we have to worry about them.

The Copenhagen Consensus took the view that since we do not have infinite resources to spend on everything worthwhile, we should prioritize those where we can do more good more effectively. They identified such areas as HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, subsidies & trade liberalization, malaria, new agricultural technology, and water & sanitation projects. At sixteenth, under 'bad projects' came the Kyoto Protocol. In view of the good which could be achieved elsewhere with the money, it seems extraordinary that so much of it is being expended for such feeble results.

Michael Crichton’s new book Climate of Fear is about global warming. The author of Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain turns his attention to what he describes as a political, not a scientific, agenda. CNN reports that although:

"State of Fear" sounds like a typical Crichton thriller, but this time he's using the novel as a platform, tacking on a five-page message stating his notion that the theory of global warming is speculative at best, and a 14-page bibliography of works supporting his views.

Crichton's author's statement is new even for Crichton. In it, he argues that a political agenda, not scientific evidence, is the foundation for predictions that the planet's climate will warm by 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. World powers, he says, use global warming to keep citizens in a state of fear, just as they did with the Cold War.

Crichton started, rather like Bjorn Lomborg, with the view that global warming is a threat. He began to study climate data and charts, expecting to find proof. However, the more he hunted, the more unsatisfied he became with the evaluations and speculations. Like Lomborg, he thinks resources are being diverted to the more fashionable "threat" and away from areas where they could do more good more immediately.

"Why are we not feeding people in this world who are hungry? Why are we not giving clean water to the almost billion people who don't have clean water? The greatest sources of environmental degradation is poverty. Why aren't we cleaning up poverty?"

The four-year Bright project (a UK government study) reported on Monday that GM crops are no more harmful to the environment than ordinary crops. It found that GM crops, used in rotation, did not deplete the soil of weed seeds needed by birds and other wildlife. The report pointed to the benefits of GM crops in such areas as herbicide use.

This comes after unfounded scare stories from environmentalist groups have damaged research and development of GM crops, delaying by years their benefits in food production for poorer countries, and in combating blindness in children by vitamin-enriched rice.

There are wider effects, too. Scientists used to announce their progress proudly at each breakthrough in new areas, enabling others to take an interest and speculate about future possibilities. The behaviour of unscrupulous environmental groups has changed that, though. Scientists and research businesses now know there are predatory NGOs waiting to fan the next scare in order to boost their profile and their funding. They have also learned that good science and truth are no defence against cleverly manipulated hysteria.

The rational response is silence. What is not announced cannot be seized upon and used to generate unjustified alarm. If they do not publicize their successes, there will be no mindless slogans such as 'Frankenstein foods' thrown at them. They will be able to continue their research to develop new products without having to face irrational hostility from self-serving NGOs.

That lobby had already seized upon nanotechnology as its next victim, with stories of turning the planet into 'grey goo.' It will be difficult to sustain such campaigns without news of new developments to latch onto. The wise researchers are sensibly keeping quiet.

The closed-door strategy has been adopted in response to the lurid misrepresentation of their work by those who gain from doing so. It is a pity for the rest of us because it brings secrecy where there was open discussion. It takes away a little of our pleasure in being able to follow the latest scientific advances and to speculate about them. The strategy has been forced upon them, but it will result in all of us knowing a little bit less about the world we inhabit.

Modernization, the replacement of muscle by machines, is a universal social solvent. Even when resisted, it erodes established social and economic patterns, and threatens ecosystems.

The reason is compelling and pervasive; peasants and tribal members ultimately succumb to mechanisms yielding enhanced productivity. They rapidly scrap traditional practices in favor of those more materially productive. Many Greens argue the market process fosters these changes. They're correct. Hence, they insist, it must be stifled.

Here they are wrong. Given strong, nearly universal propensities toward improving material conditions, solutions to many environmental problems lie in fostering responsible wealth creation and broad distribution. Rich societies are cleaner, healthier, and ultimately greener.

This transition toward modernity disturbs many people, especially deep Greens. They are annoyed that so many people want what they consider the "wrong things", e.g. radios, motorized vehicles, refrigeration, hot water on demand, and TV.

Russia has now signed up to the Kyoto protocol, reluctantly, and allegedly after huge financial inducements from some EU countries. But Philip Stott, professor of Biogeography at the University of London, thinks it will have negligible impact on climate. In today’s Times (difficult link for US readers) he says that:

Clamping down on carbon emissions could drain $1 trillion from the world economy, hit production and raise energy prices punitively.

And all for very little effect, except on the economies of developed countries. He adds:

Moreover, we know that the Kyoto Protocol will do nothing about climate change: at the most it will delay changes by two years over the next century. To declare otherwise is to mislead.

More embarrassingly, most European countries are far from attaining their own emission targets, although they freely lecture the good folk of Ohio and Oklahoma. More over, future energy demand does not lie in the West, but in the East, in China, India, Indonesia and Russia, most of which are not bound to make emission cuts by the Kyoto treaty. China will happily support Kyoto in theory, knowing that it can benefit economically as Western economies make themselves uncompetitive by donning the eco-hairshirt.

Meanwhile China continues a massive programme to build dozens of coal-fired power stations, with economic growth which boosts world demand for oil. Why is Kyoto so important if it will achieve so little? If it is some kind of totem or symbol, it seems to be a very expensive one.

The perennial Bush-bashing target has been the climate issue - with the enthusiastic participation of UK chief science adviser Sir David King ("Global Warming is a greater threat than terrorism"). Now the New York Times has arranged to interview a notorious global warmer, Dr James E. Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan. He criticizes White House climate policy, claiming the "Bush administration has ignored growing evidence that sea levels could rise significantly unless prompt action is taken."

He apparently bases this assertion on his own publication [Proc Nat'l Acad Sci 2004] that to preserve global coastlines, global warming must not exceed one degree celsius. As sole support for this unusual claim, he cites there his recent article in the popular Scientific American vol 290, pp 68-77, 2004. But all evidence shows sea levels rising steadily - by about 400 feet in the past 18,000 years, since the peak of the most recent ice age. Significantly, the measured rate of rise did not accelerate during the substantial warming of the early 20th century.

In addition, as is well known, prompt policy action (by cutting emissions of greenhouse gases in accord with the Kyoto Protocol) would lower the calculated temperature rise for 2050 by at most a tiny one-twentieth of a degree C - too small to even measure.

Further, Bush did not "withdraw" from Kyoto - as his critics claim. While he has not submitted Kyoto for ratification, neither did Clinton - probably because the US Senate in 1997 had voted unanimously against such a treaty - including also Senator Kerry.

The international ban on shooting black rhino has just been lifted. At its latest conference in Bangkok, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), agreed to permit South Africa and Namibia to licence a limited amount of trophy hunting.

As we argued in Around The World in 80 Ideas, allowing well-heeled sharp shooters to track and kill a limited number of big game, such as rhino, should lead to a rejuvenation in the total population. How is this so?

In the past, the problem has been that no one has any property right to wildlife, such as black rhino. Consequently, they are often seen as little more than huge pests by local people. What is more, if they can make substantial amounts of money from poaching, for ivory or hides, then the wild population is likely to tumble. This is precisely what has happened with rhino in many parts of Africa.

The CITES decision to allow the annual killing of five black rhino in both Namibia and South Africa, should help with the conservation of the species. Licences will only be issued for older animals, well past breeding age.

Wealthy sportsmen are prepared to pay as much as £140,000 a time for the privilige of shooting a mature rhino. This money can be used to protect the wildlife population, and make it a sustainable resource. As the delegates from Southern Africa explained at the CITES conference, creating an economic incentive should both preserve and extend the rhino's habitat.

A similar policy might well help other endangered species, such as the tiger, whose numbers in the wild, according to recent press accounts are plumetting (see Sunday Telegraph, 'Western tourists to blame for slaughter of endangered tiger') .

Creating a market in wildlife, when managed skillfully, is one of the best way of preserving a host of endangered species. It will be instructive to monitor how this trial scheme fares.

Former Environment Minister Michael Meacher has implied (in the Financial Times) that, if only there was not an America, the world would have 26 per cent fewer emissions - ergo end of global warming. The fact that the $5,000bn global economy would be nearly 25 per cent worse off and Europe on its knees seems to have eluded him.

He jumps to the further conclusion that if you are not supporting Kyoto, you are not doing anything for the environment. Wrong again. As governor of Texas in 1998, George W. Bush paved the way for the most successful, speediest and most economic policies for Renewables in the whole of America, if not the world. In fact, Texas will achieve 10 per cent renewables long before Britain. No mean achievement, considering that Americans use twice as much power (1.3 kilowatt demand per capita) as the average Briton!

It may suit Mr Meacher's Weltanschauung to blame everything on America. Not only is this approach ill-founded in fact, there is no way in which it serves Britain's national interest. Besides, it ignores the wider, benevolent commercial forces at work around the world. Companies such as General Electric are relentlessly driving down the costs of wind and solar power. And, ironically, America's problems in Iraq, which have admittedly helped to drive up the price of oil by 50 per cent, are stimulating the adoption of renewables even more.

In an article in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (reported here), authors Robert Jackson and William Schlesinger of Duke University, ask how effective would be some of the alternative suggestions for the US to cut its greenhouse gas emissions.

If farmers stopped tilling all the cropland in the country, and either switched to alternative farming techniques or left land fallow, carbon emissions would drop by less than 4%, the researchers report. If extra trees were to be planted, they would have to occupy one-third of that land to reach a 10% carbon emission reduction.

On the other hand, Jackson and Schlesinger's estimates show that the US could achieve the same 10% reduction by doubling the fuel efficiency of all cars and SUVs. This could be done by switching to existing hybrid electric vehicles which run partly on electricity.

These vehicles currently cost more, as the authors concede, but their point is that relatively small technological changes "could make considerable dents in US emissions," as Jackson puts it. Any further oil price rises will make hybrid vehicles relatively more attractive, and could encourage more people to make the switch.

Of course none of this involves us "giving up on consumption," or "learning to live more simply," and may not appeal to those who want us to go back to nature (whatever that means). It does, however, suggest that technological fixes to our problems might be easier than some suppose, and that solutions could be brought by more technology, not less.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, was in London today, describing his Copenhagen Consensus attempt to prioritize the world's most pressing human problems, so that we can direct resources rationally towards solving them.

I went along to meet him (see picture) and found him on his usual good form. He told us that the Copenhagen Consensus harnessed the work of some of the world's leading economists, many Nobel Laureates, making an exhaustive cost-benefit analysis of issues such as climate change, malnutrition, communicable diseases, lack of education, poor sanitation, and corruption.

Their conclusion is that our top priority should be HIV/AIDS. About 28 million cases could be prevented by 2010. The cost would be $27 billion, with benefits almost forty times as high. Malnutrition is another issue we can tackle very effectively. Bringing clean water and sanitation to the world are also good in terms of bang-for-the-buck. But spending the huge amounts of money required by Kyoto in order to stave off climate change by a few years is, the economists concluded, very bad value for money.

I was also impressed that the Copenhagen Consensus economists put free trade high up on the list of worthwhile aims. "In anything you do, there will be winners and losers," explained Lomborg. "With free trade, you do have distributional issues, but the winners far outnumber the losers, both globally and in the developing world. Indeed, global free trade would lift 300m-500m people out of povery."

Challenging stuff. You can read it all in his new book, Global Crises, Global Solutions.

This week, Russia signed up to the Kyoto Protocol, and oil hit $52 a barrel. You may not think it, but Russia's action is actually bad for the world's environment, health, and economy. The oil price is actually good for it.

The Russian decision is bad because it has been bribed and blackmailed (mainly by the EU) into bringing into force something that forces the rich countries to spend vast amounts, pointlessly. People say the rich countries are the biggest polluters - but that's because they produce most of the world's wealth too. Their pollution-per-product is small, because they are rich and can afford a clean environment.

Oil isn't pricy just because of Iraq. On the demand side, China - the world's second-biggest economy in purchasing-power parity terms - is sucking in oceans of the stuff as they feverishly industrialize. Like Britain in the coal-fuelled Industrial Revolution, they don't mind coughing a bit if it puts food on the table. They need to industrialize before they can become rich enough to buy environmental quality. Kyoto forgets this: and the huge amounts being wasted on it will just slow down this process.

We'll stop using oil soon, but not because of Kyoto. Nor because it's running out. It isn't. We always find more, though in more awkward and expensive places. Meanwhile, renewables are falling in cost 50% a decade. We'll stop using oil simply because other things will be cheaper.

Governments won't solve the global environment problem through their huge spending on Kyoto or on bizarre offshore windfarms. But the market will.