The Risk-Monger’s Inbox overflows with invitations to next month’s Risk Summit in Dublin. The main reason he is giving this event a miss is that much risk research today has become tired, predictable and ineffective.

Commonality, the technique of manufacturing a perception that we all agree on something, allows activists to design evidence light, communications rich campaigns. Some recent victories by anti-chemicals activists show that you don’t need facts or evidence to change policies in Brussels.

World Malaria Day 2013 came and went … and nobody cared. Greenpeace did not accept responsibility for the tens of millions of needless deaths, choosing rather to celebrate Cute Penguin Day instead. The Risk-Monger is ready to give up on evidence-based policy making.

One would expect European policy to promote jobs and competitiveness. But when most of the people influencing policy in Brussels have never worked in a company that makes things or provides services (and considers corporations as vulgar and immoral), should we be surprised that regulators are unable to push balanced job-growth policies?

We have been told, repeatedly, for two decades that climate change is happening, it is man-made and if we don’t change soon, consequences will be catastrophic (if it hasn’t already started). Evidence though shows 16 years of flat global mean temperature, and a failure in climate models whose predictions were deemed 95% certain. Still authorities are certain. The Risk-Monger begins a series of blogs on the commonality policy crisis with a simple question: How stupid are we?

Salary: None
Experience: None necessary

It is time for the European Environment Agency (EEA) to get serious and not let their activist dogma guide their publicly funded “research”. In their second version of Late Lessons from Early Warnings (Chapter 2), the EEA pretended to address the issue of precautionary false positives – where decisions taken for precautionary reasons have led [...]

The Risk-Monger attended an event in Brussels on proposals for EU shale gas regulation. He was expecting to sit back and enjoy some serious stakeholder mud wrestling. But it seemed like nobody really cared except for the small anti-shale environmental groups. This lobbyist vacuum frightened the Risk-Monger.

Bjørn Lomborg shows how environmental activist groups like Greenpeace have held up trials on Golden Rice for twelve years for no good reason, arguing they should be held in part responsible for the loss of around eight million lives in that time from vitamin A deficiency. The Risk-Monger has a problem with a basic premise underlying Lomborg’s conclusion: that to blame NGO activists, you would have to assume that these campaigners are in some way responsible for their actions.

The European Commission is proposing to ban certain pesticides under the precautionary principle without adequate consideration of available science or concern for the potential catastrophic consequences of their actions. Why would they do such a thing?

The Risk-Monger tries to show how wind turbines are profane and vulgar, encouraging ecological exploitation in much the same way as a prostitute on a street corner affects our assessment of worth. Warning: Reading this blog might influence how you look at wind turbines in future.

The European Environment Agency released the second tomb of Late Lessons from Early Warnings last week. It appears that this EU Agency is continuing its campaigning and activism for the precautionary principle as a means to attack European research and industry. What makes these relentless activists even more troubling is that, in Late Lessons II, they are pretending to be scientists.

Mark Lynas, one of the principal strategists and drivers behind the environmental activism against GMOs, admitted that the anti-GMO campaigns he had led were not science-based, often anecdotal, and counter-productive. His recognition of the facts on GMOs, his regret for the anti-science tactics NGOs had used and his sincere apology exhibit an integrity rarely seen today.

In the time of peace on earth and good will to man, the Risk Monger ponders the sadistic senselessness of Christmas, and why it must be stopped if we ever want to truly be sustainable.

The decision passed at the UN COP-18 climate conference in Doha requiring developed nations to compensate developing countries for losses due to climate change has been hailed as a significant achievement. The Risk-Monger asks: How many millions will die from this ignorant decision?

The Risk-Monger recently went through a series of blood tests and the results showed he was suffering from a high exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals. The source of this exposure appears to be his vegetarian lifestyle.

Biomonitoring (the biological monitoring of environmental exposures of chemicals in our blood, urine, tissue …) has become a politically tool so manipulated by anti-chemicals campaigners that it has rendered the scientific value of such research completely useless.

Like many, I am still in shock that Italian courts have handed out six-year prison sentences to the six seismologists and one official for giving inadequate advice to the residents of L’Aquila days prior to the 6.3 magnitude earthquake that killed 309 people on 6 April 2009. The Italian courts stated that the scientific committee [...]

A new Norwegian university environmental life-cycle assessment confirms the Risk-Monger’s view that electric cars are worse for the environment than diesel cars. How hard will it be for us to ignore this reality and continue to pretend that electric cars are green?

In this third and last part of the summer back-to-basics risk blogs, the Risk-Monger examines why risks are perceived as negative and how reactionary risk management (post event, post-precautionary) contaminates the risk management process. He also denies that he beats his wife!