Gary Moller: Bird Flu - Let the Great Culling Begin!

New Zealand is grappling with its first outbreak of highly pathogenic bird flu, a development that threatens not only our poultry industry but our entire agricultural backbone.

The culling of 80,000 chickens is already underway, a knee-jerk reaction framed as necessary to stop the virus from spreading. But this approach, fuelled by fear and influenced by powerful vested interests, may do more harm than good.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 13/11/24

A sorry state of affairs: offence was given – or was it taken? – thanks to PM’s failure to foresee the effect of his choice of words

“Never apologise, never explain” (according to one source consulted by Point of Order scribes) was the infamous dictum of former Bank of England governor Montagu Norman and epitomised the British take on central bank communication.

But maybe not. An article in the New Yorker said “Never apologize, never explain” is often attributed to the nineteenth-century Oxford scholar Benjamin Jowett, who supposedly added, “Get it over with and let them howl.”

Ian Bradford: UK Professor says billions need to die to “save the planet.”

Just over  a week ago,  Bill McGuire, an Emeritus Professor at University College London said this:  If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I can see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown is the culling of human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.”

 The issue of ‘overpopulation’ is one that has been long present in the climate science community but is rarely discussed in public in the stark terms employed by McGuire.  McGuire is articulating what some in the climate alarmist camp actually believe. A view that climate change is really about overpopulation is not that uncommon among climate alarmists. 

Matt Ridley: Too virulent to spread

Here we go again. A new bird-flu virus in China, the H7N9 strain, is spreading alarm. It has infected about 130 people and killed more than 30. Every time this happens, some journalists compete to foment fear, ably assisted by cautious but worried scientists, and then tell the world to keep calm. We need a new way to talk about the risk of a flu pandemic, because the overwhelming probability is that this virus will kill people, yes, but not in vast numbers.