Matt Ridley

This week’s ship collision off the Humber could have been much worse. Just one person is unaccounted for and one other needed hospital treatment. The fire is mostly extinguished, the two ships are disentangled from each other and the damage to the tanker is less than feared. It is early days, but there are reasons to be optimistic that the event will not prove to be the catastrophe that some feared.  First, it’s likely to be cock-up rather than conspiracy. True, it may seem suspicious that a US government jet-fuel cargo is involved: Iran and others would enjoy that.

At the end of this month, one of the world’s most renowned scientists will send $400 to a charity to settle a wager with another of the world’s most renowned scientists. We don’t yet know who will win, but it is likely to be the wrong person, in my view. The money will probably come from Cambridge, England, not Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rees thinks if the tragedy of Covid has an identified ‘villain’ it would aggravate tense US-China relations The two scientists involved are Lord (Martin) Rees, the Astronomer Royal and former president of the Royal Society, of Cambridge University, and Steven Pinker, the Harvard linguist, neuroscientist and author of many bestselling books.

Who is to blame for the devastating floods that hit Valencia on 29 October? The mob that surrounded King Felipe at the weekend and drove Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez out of town with a hail of mud and stones was angry at the failure to forecast the flood and warn people to get out of its way. The BBC would like us to be angry at man-made climate change for causing the storm – putting out a headline the very next day: ‘Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse.’ Charts of rainfall in Spain show no trend towards a higher frequency of more extreme downpours Yet Valencia had a similarly terrible flood in 1957, in which 81 people died, long before climate change became the go-to excuse for any bad weather.

The Duke of Norfolk is best known for presiding over the coronation as hereditary Earl Marshal, but what really gets him excited is a native farmland bird, the grey partridge. Nearly 20 years ago he was appalled to learn from the veteran ecologist Dick Potts that the species was down to its last three pairs on his estate in Sussex and about to go extinct. He decided to do something about it. Today the Peppering estate has around 300 pairs of partridges, as well as corn buntings, lapwings, rare butterflies, long lost cornfield flowers and other wildlife. Last year the duke brought curlew eggs south from the Pennines and hatched them off to try to re-establish the species on the South Downs.

I last saw a willow tit on my farm about a year ago. I’m searching for them again this spring, listening for their ‘chair chair’ calls, but I am worried that they may be extinct here. They are dying out everywhere: down by 92 per cent nationwide in the 50 years from 1967. And the reason is not pesticides or climate change or agriculture or habitat loss. It’s blue tits. Willow tits have never taken to visiting bird tables, but blue tits love them. So come the spring, hordes of peanut-fattened blue tits fan out across the countryside looking for nesting holes and – hey presto – they find the little hollows that willow tits have been laboriously excavating in rotten birch trees and, being more aggressive, steal them.

Hardly a week goes by without a mention of DNA’s contribution to criminal justice. Last week Sandip Patel was convicted of killing a prostitute near Baker Street 30 years ago: DNA belatedly proved that his hairs were caught in her ring. A few days before, a double murderer, Colin Pitchfork, was controversially granted a parole hearing 36 years after being the defendant in ‘the first case of its kind in Britain to use DNA profiling’, as the Times put it. Only that’s wrong. Colin Pitchfork was not the first person in Britain to be convicted with DNA; he was the first person in the world. The story of how DNA profiling was invented and then applied to solving crimes is a truly remarkable, entirely British success story.

Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’ He is right. There is almost no debate about regulating high-risk virology, whereas the world is in a moral panic about artificial intelligence. The recent global summit at Bletchley Park essentially focused on how to make us safe from Hal the malevolent computer.

Every year I lay a wreath a week early, because Blyth, my nearest town, was a submarine port. Submariners were banned from the first Armistice Day parade in Whitehall by a bossy admiral on the grounds that they were pirates who targeted civilians. In response they adopted skull-and-crossbones badges and arranged their own celebrations on the Embankment in London, and in Blyth and Dundee, a week before the official ones. The tradition survives more than a century later. The Cenotaph deliberately puts the sacrifice of Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist and Christian on an equal footing. The veterans who a decade ago would have memories of chasing the Bismarck or bringing a pet reindeer calf back on board a sub from Murmansk have now faded from the scene.