COALS FROM NEWCASTLE

One cannot fault Matt Ridley's sense of place-  at risk of enlisting on the losing side in the war against cliche' he has become an equally staunch defender of the Northumbrian landscape and the coal mining that re-arranges it - a paradox of affection reflecting how many of the Ridley estate's broad acres are underlain by coal measures.

But what ever can the ex-Economist writer make of the coterie he's spent the last week responding to in WUWT, where Watts has headlined his recent WSJ Op-ed? Have any of them kept up with what the ever-skeptical Economist has been so eloquently saying about the realities of the science in question?