Matt Ridley on Climate Change

EconTalk

Library of Economics and Liberty

Economics, Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Education, Science, Books, Philosophy, History, Ethics, Courses, Business, Interviews

4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2015

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Science writer and author Matt Ridley discusses climate change with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Based on his reading of the scientific evidence, Ridley describes himself as a "lukewarmer." While Ridley agrees that humans have made the climate warmer, he argues that the impact is small or positive over some temperature ranges and regions. He rejects the catastrophic scenarios that some say are sufficiently likely to justify dramatic policy responses, and he reflects on the challenges of staking out an unpopular position on a contentious policy issue.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:06.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:10.0	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast,
0:15.0	and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:19.0	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going back to 2006.
0:25.0	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org, we'd love to hear from you.
0:31.0	Today is June 18, 2015, and my guest is author and science writer Matt Ridley.
0:37.0	Matt, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:39.0	Russ, it's great to be back on the show again.
0:42.0	We are going to talk about climate change, your view of the current state of our scientific knowledge
0:47.0	and some controversies you've been in.
0:49.0	How has your thinking on this issue evolved over time?
0:53.0	Give us some background.
0:55.0	Well, I've covered climate change as a journalist for more than 25 years.
0:59.0	I first wrote about it in the late 1980s for the economist.
1:03.0	At the time I took everything that alarm scientists were saying at face value.
1:09.0	I gradually became more skeptical in the 1990s.
1:12.0	I then returned to alarmism for a while because of seeing the hockey stick graph,
1:18.0	which seemed to me to demonstrate unambiguously that what was happening today was much more drastic,
1:23.0	was unprecedented and much more drastic than what we'd seen.
1:27.0	So when I discovered that that graph was actually very misleading,
1:32.0	once you understood the statistics behind it, I began to look at all the rest of the evidence
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Library of Economics and Liberty, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Library of Economics and Liberty and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.