Hello and welcome to more or less, the programme which brushes the teeth of statistics for the

full two minutes, we floss too.

This week Victorian diseases are returning, but is austerity really to blame?

Will moderate alcohol consumption really damage your mental health to the tune of £2,400

a year?

And 8 years after his death, we thought Nigel Pagetor was a cold case, but a listener

email has given us fresh interest into the goings-on at Ambridge.

But first, on Tuesday, today programme listeners woke up to the news that the left-leaning

think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, had news statistics that showed the

scale of the damage we humans are doing to the planet.

When you look at the scale of the problems outlined in the report, like the number of floods

increasing by 15 times since 2005, extinction rates increasing by a huge rate, are these

reversible?

The same numbers were reported in the Guardian and elsewhere, but they just didn't sound

quite right to some people.

For example, Mark Linus, author of Six Degrees, a book about the effects of climate change.

So this jumped out at me because I was just in the middle of doing some research about

the impacts of climate change for a book I'm updating, and it struck me that the claim

that was being made about floods increasing by 15 times in the last few years since 2005,

it just did not ring true with what I understood about the science so far.

So what happened next?

This is one of those rare instances where Twitter actually leads to a positive engagement

...