Science, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing these days, it seems.

If you had asked me a few years ago the answer was absolutely clear. No, not the technology, that's just the side effect, a little bonus, cream on top.

The real importance of science, for the last 500...

Let us imagine, for a moment, that sanity has prevailed. The deniers and oil stooges have been defeated by the forces of solar and reason, and the world, being as one, sets out to reduce greenhouse gas production, aiming to get back to CO2 levels of 350ppm as rapidly as...

There is much confusion in the media about the remarkable Craig Venter achievement of inserting laboratory-made DNA into a bacterial cell and telling it to go forth and multiply, which it did. There's all sorts of nonsense on one hand about how if Craig could intelligently design life, so could...

We all know there are all kinds of things that religion is incompatible with -- democracy, science, social equity, rational debate, blind justice. But it is sometimes thought that being an environmentalist is compatible with religious belief. That you could divorce irrational beliefs about imaginary friends, the subordinate role of...

It's strange how, among the segment of climate change deniers who think the planet is warming but think it is all perfectly natural and we should just lay back and enjoy it and think of Greenland, the view that global warming never did anyone any harm is dominant. They welcome,...

Is CO2 causing the madness that is afflicting the Earth (tea baggers, suicide bombers, denialists, creationists, gun lobbyists, evangelists, militias, reality tv contestants)? I ask the question merely to give me the chance of answering it with a resounding yes, and for you to instantly say, "oh, of course, yes,...

Every time I log on to Twitter someone seems to be "detoxing." Now I don't really know what this is. Apparently celebrities do it, all the time, perhaps while being treated for sexual addiction (who knew?!). It seems to involve stopping eating food (you call it pollution, I call it...

Those poor, primitive creatures we call creationists have to live their lives in spite of many difficulties, and one of the most significant is language. If you have ever tried to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as written by Geoffrey, or a speech by Sarah Palin as written by anybody, you...

A strange attack on atheists over Easter by a couple of clerics in Australia. We've obviously got them worried. All the usual kind of nonsense, The fundamentalist Anglican said "It's about our determination as human beings to have our own way, to make our own rules, to live...

A curious thing about creationists. I try to study the minds of these strange people, who still, 150 years after Alfred Wallace, retain the primitive mindset of the eighteenth century when people thought that animal species, including the naked ape, had been created, each in its own place, by a...

Look I'm puzzled, and if there are any libertarians, neoconservatives, teabaggers, invisible-hand-of-the-marketeers, the-UN-has-black-helicopters readers out there perhaps they could enlighten me.

See these are people who apparently believe in government of the capitalists, by the capitalists and for the capitalists. Believe in the economy red in tooth and claw. Believe...

Going through airport security recently I was pulled up when the scanners spotted a can of shaving cream in my bag. Out of the queue, unpack bag, find shaving cream among all your other personal hygiene items as people keep a wary eye on you as a possible terrorist.

And...

Who was it who said we shouldn't tell children fairy stories, things that aren't true? I disagree. My grandchildren all love made up things, strange things, things "beyond the present world". Love pretending that odd things like flying and magic can happen. Love, in fact, stuff that children have always...

The delusions of the religious are so all-pervasive these days, perhaps more so than they have been in several hundred years, that we seek explanations, and metaphors, for how our lovely Enlightenment, not to mention our irreligious Sixties, was stolen from us. And we seek explanations for other retrogressions of...

Having read about the growing evangelical influence in American sports (players dropping to knees to pray after a touchdown, "prayer circles" on the 50 yard line, every team having a chaplain, a "Fellowship of Christian Athletes") I wonder if there are any areas of American life that are...

Are climate change denialists all drunk all the time?

Increasingly, as I read threads relating to climate change the responses from denialists have become shriller and shriller, words are slurred, offers to fight becoming more common, vomiting on the floor not out of the question.

And hesitatingly offering a quiet...

There are times when all good women, and men, need to come to the aid of the party. Times when profound changes in understanding occur. Times that put a stamp on a man (or woman) for better or worse. Times that try men's souls.

We have just celebrated the...

All of us who concerned about the future of the planet have misunderestimated the opposition from those who are not. We thought that the flooding of web sites, talk back radio, television chat shows, letters columns in newspapers, blogs, with tens of thousands of mindless repetitions of a few talking...

You all know about Godwin's Law - first person to introduce Hitler into a thread loses the argument. Well, I'm about to invent a new law, let's call it (oh, I don't know, do you really think so? all right then) Horton's Law. Very similar idea, different hero - first...

From time to time some religious leader, somewhere, seeking to be provocative, will announce, smugly, that of course all morality comes from religion and therefore atheists, those scum of the Earth, have no morality.

Let's leave aside for the moment, the fact that not only is there absolutely no...