The Oil Drum

Schlesinger and Global Warming and Techno Optimism

..He sees the fight over Global Warming as a passion in Europe, but a transient phase in the US......

I find these views expressed by Schlesinger about Global Warming very worrying, mainly because he is such a well known figure and people will unfortunately listen to him. He seems to be basically dismissing it and implying that Peak Oil is more important. It seems quite clear that he is not able to get his head around these two major issues and can only manage one, so he dismisses the other.

And yet in the meantime, we have an acceleration of the melting of the Arctic sea ice far quicker than any scientist dared suggest and we also have J. Hanson getting really concerned that we are going to push all the way into the tipping zone and even past it.

I sense that all these optimistic figures being spouted out at the conference so far showing higher production and a very long plateau rather than a peak are part of a message that is saying. Hey we will have more time than we thought and it will give technology a chance to develop and get us through ...and so we can largely continue as we are except for some peripheral changes. The trouble with this rosy picture is that Global Warming is lurking there as an even graver threat, so the solution (as usual) is simply to dismiss and thereby ultimately deny it in order for the currently presented scenario to have credibility.

Msg to Heading Out: If you are talking to Schlesinger again, maybe you would ask him directly what he thinks of J. Hanson's warning that we could be hitting the point of no return (for the climate) within a decade.

I suspect though in practice from his experience of politics, he actually knows how thoroughly corporations are in control of the political and economic agenda and how all the forces of law and order are ultimately deployed for their benefit and thus he knows there is little chance of them changing.