Matt Ridley

The tragic and terrifying Himalayan flash flood was caused by a chunk of mountain collapsing into a narrow gorge, sending a tsunami of mud and rock that gathered mass as it shot down the steep Trisuli river valley. More than that is not yet clear. Did a breakaway hanging glacier take a rock face with it or was it the other way round? Was there time for the debris to dam the valley and form a lake that burst or did the 60-metre flood of mud come from ice, river water, rock and soil that accumulated in the valley as the tsunami descended? Some people are already certain they know what caused this. Either climate change did it or China did it. Assorted greens rushed to blame global warming with confidence bordering on certainty.

Bordeaux and Madrid are threatened by flames. In Sicily, arsonists tied burning rags to the tails of cats to spread fires. Here in Britain the Cairngorms and Peak District national parks are ablaze. It’s the climate Armageddon, say the greens. If only we had built more wind farms and eaten fewer cows this would not be happening. Hot, dry spells undoubtedly make fires more likely, but awkwardly for those blaming climate change, wildfires are getting less frequent worldwide, not more, as the globe warms. The acreage burned has decreased steadily since 2000, according to Nasa’s satellites, and is thought to have almost halved in a century.

In the latest success story for reintroducing species to the British countryside, turtle doves, reared in captivity and released at three locations in Somerset and Devon last year, have returned to breed. Turtle doves have steeply declined in numbers, hanging on in the south and east of the country, but this scheme opens a new front in the battle to save the species as a British summer visitor. In May 2025, 244 captive-bred turtle doves were set free across three sites. Like others of their species, they spent the winter in Africa but a handful found their way back to south-west England this summer. Reintroductions like this are now all the rage among conservationists because it is a policy that can have spectacular results.

Around the turn of the century, the world embarked on an experiment. The Americas embraced the genetic modification of crops; Europe rejected it and stuck with the old ways of generating new plant varieties – bombarding seeds with gamma rays, mostly. The results are clear. Both economically and ecologically, the Americas won: more productive farmers, reduced use of pesticides, more investment in innovation, fewer emissions. By the time of the Brexit vote in 2016, polls showed the British people were no longer against genetic modification of crops. Protests by boiler-suited eco-toffs had fizzled out. But European red tape made changing our policy impossible.

Unlike last year, when drought caused many curlews in the Durham dales to delay breeding, this has been a great spring for them. Last week, wherever I walked, anxious curlew parents were whinnying above me like aerial ponies. At one point I stepped carefully aside as a day-old chick, clumsy on its oversized blue legs, tried to hide in the cotton grass. The Pennines, North York moors and eastern Scotland are the world stronghold of the curlew, or ‘whaup’, a bird whose bubbling aria fills the sky over these moors in spring so fully that you cannot find a one-minute gap of silence between their songs in a typical April dawn (I’ve tried).

The two main harms of government regulation, to be balanced against any benefits, are cost and delay. But there is another harm, rarer but lethal when it happens. Sometimes regulation perversely increases risk by lulling the regulated business or people into a false sense of safety. I had this thought last weekend as I watched a football match on television. My beloved Newcastle United beat Aston Villa in the FA Cup fourth round, but the match made headlines because of five bafflingly bad decisions taken by the referee and his linesmen: failing to award two clear penalties, failing to give a red card for a dangerous tackle and failing to spot two offsides that led to goals. Four of the five decisions went against my team but that is not my point.

The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as it goes against the interests of environmental activists, polar bears being the very emblem, mascot and clickbait of climate change cataclysm. But the bears’ stubborn refusal to get the memo and starve has become too obvious to ignore. The latest evidence comes from the Barents Sea, and the Norwegian-administered archipelago of Svalbard in particular, where bear numbers have been steadily increasing. Surprisingly, they are also getting fatter, according to measurements taken when bears are caught and weighed. This is despite a decline in sea-ice cover in the area, especially in autumn.

Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent Cop summit in Belem, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. By failing to secure new pledges for a cut in fossil fuels, Cop achieved less than nothing. The venue caught fire, the air conditioning malfunctioned – and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper.

Imagine dropping a pea-sized capsule through a spherical chamber and hitting it with a colossal bolt of laser energy as it falls. If the capsule contains a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two heavy versions (isotopes) of hydrogen, then the atoms may fuse, turning into helium and emitting fast neutrons as they do so. Those neutrons and their accompanying radiation can heat molten salts around the walls of the chamber and that heat can be used to power industrial processes – or to boil water and generate electricity through a steam turbine. That’s the dream of a firm called Xcimer, one of the more ingenious fusion energy startups, based in Colorado.

‘What’s missing?’ the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at the city of Los Angeles laid out in the haze below us. ‘Cranes!’ he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital ‘bits’ instead of physical ‘atoms’, because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing.