It's hard to know how to react to this; on the one hand the planet is saved and on the other the affluent middle class may be doomed to poverty. It also seems to put an entirely different perspective on reducing carbon consumption, as much now for conservation as preventing climate change. I presume we are still locked into mid term water shortages and a population exodus from places like Bangladesh.

If some IPCC scenarios can now be discarded this could sharpen plans for the future. For example should much of the remaining fossil fuel be used to smelt silicon for vast arrays of solar panels in desert areas? We need to think how many people there will be, say in 2050, and how much energy they will need for electricity, transport and food production. There is also the mixed blessing that Australia's reserves of coal, gas and uranium may last well past the world average. This could be a material advantage but as Iraq shows also a cause for aggression. Interesting times.

"The world’s greatest future problem is that too many people must share too little energy." That is the nub of the problem, except that the word "energy" should be replaced by the word "resources".

According to my rough calculation, Kjel's prediction of the rate of increase of use of energy worldwide is about a factor of ten, while my prediction of the rate of increase of population is around four times from now to the end of the century. This does give us some scope for a modest saving of energy if the poor countries remain poor and the affluent countries are frugal. The former is probable, the latter doubtful.

In general, the availability of food is more likely to be the determinant, rather than the shortage of energy, although I am not holding my breathe about the effects of climate change.

i have seen discussion of the danger of methane in the ocean and tundra being released by very modest modest temperature rises. if true, fossil fuel use will be the trigger of sudden, possibly catastrophic, swings of temperature.

An excellent program on the ABC "Crude" said that we had enough coal to cause catastrophic climate change 6 times over.

Somebodies figures are wrong.

>>Somebodies figures are wrong<<

How true.

But it is far too late to inject any reality into the discussion, the entire debate is now a political issue.

On my way to the airport this morning (so I don't know which programme) I listened to a guy spruiking "a green investment" that bought you an acre of Amazonian rainforest. For the money, you would pay the natives to look after it for you - and therefore the world - by preventing it from being logged or burned, so that it could continue its ineffable greenness...

The fee for this service was only a piddling 5% or so for the middleman, and with the destruction of rainforest causing as much damage to the ecosphere as the entire US CO2 output (so the spruiker spruiked) it just had to be the best deal ever...

As I said somewhere here before, if my son was at the age to decide on a career, I'd point him towards carbon trading. My son, I'd say, thar's gold in them thar rainforests, just make sure you are the middleman. Forget hedge funds... no, better still, set up a carbon-trading based hedge fund... after all, there's one born every minute.

We are being conned, people.

Unfortunately, it is becoming impossible to tell, amidst all the noise, smoke and mirrors, by whom.

Hooray for Aleklett, injecting a bit of common sense into the vexing climate change argument. He may be right, but does it really matter?

Like it or not, I have a very simplistic theory that involves “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” – Thanks Professor Bartlett http://edison.ncssm.edu/programs/colloquia/bartlett.ram ).

Before the “Selfish Big Brained Mammal” (SBBM) – Thanks Reg Morrison, author of “Plague Species” for this term – discovered fossil energy about 150 years ago, there were only about .5 to 1.5 billion of this species (ours) on the planet. Since then, entirely riding on the back of cheap and easily available finite fossil energy (FFE) its numbers have grown to around 6.6 billion. When the SBBM loses its once only FFE bonus its population will slide or maybe crash back to pre FFE levels... Simple...

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