The Grauniad seems to be dying - hurrah!

[longfingernails]

I doubt Polly will be selling her Tuscan villa any time soon, but it will be a wonderful day when the BBC's in-house journal gets what it deserves.

www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/media/8580566/Job-cull-looms-at-The-Guardian.html

Yes, 'they' are the scientists, the sons and daughters of the people, educated at the people's universities so that they can one day contribute to the health and prosperity of the people. Yes one day the oil will run out and they will discover other energy sources, and if we fund our universities adequately, hopefully they will come up with something better than windmills. Otherwise a progressive will be having a laugh.

Wow!! since the latest predictions by the oil industry are that at the8 current* rate of consumption there's about another 40 years left, I'm intriquied to see how much humanity will have advanced during that time. Mind you, we'll have to stop China, India and all those developing nations from using more oil if we want to keep it that long.

claig/slug/Grimma - the oil market is getting slammed this afternoon. Prices hard down 4 -5% as the IEA issue an emergency press release suggesting oil will be drawn down from strategic reserves of 60 million barrels (30 million from US reserves). US troops being withdrawn from Afghanistan and redeployed. Bilderberg meeting in June down played climate change. Bahrain just been given $20bn by the Gulf cooperation council to stabilise the politcal unrest. All anounced in the last 24 hours.

Key geopolitical issues in Iran, China and US now come to the fore before Xmas. Rifts between religious leaders and President in Iran, political unrest and economic slow down in China and Presidential election in USA.

Peak Oil is a nonsense. Geopolitics are the key issue. USA is still a major hydrocarbon producer and consumer and control major untapped reserves in Alaska, Iraq and Saudi. China has little or no oil of its own but Iran is a major strategic supplier. China has just built an advanced aircraft carrier.

Interesting times.

Agree, MoreBeta. Excellent analysis. Haven't been keeping up with this side of things. Didn't realise that Bilderberg has played down climate change. That adds to my view that the tide is turning on climate change and the progressives will eventually be left stranded on the shore.

slug,
"the latest predictions by the oil industry"
the key phrase there is by the "oil industry". It is to their interest to claim that there is a shortage and we only have 40 years left, just as it is to the interest of the climate change lobby to say that "we have only 50 days left to save the planet".

And as you say it is all about power, the economy and geopolitics and has absolutely nothing to do with scientists looking down their microscopes. It appears that teh powerful are turning the tide against global warming for economic and other reasons. The game's up and it will soon be over.

the progressives will eventually be left stranded on the shore

Kind of wish it were so. Wouldn't wish to see the reactionaries submerged standing on where the shore used to be. Time will tell, indeed.

Of course its mostly about geopolitics. Of course the oil industry has a vested interest in understatement. All sorts of other materials will probably run out before the oil, which may of itself make developing alternatives much more challenging.

Humanity is safe, we will thrive, provided we are not stopped and hampered by political forces. Don't believe the doom-laden lies of catastrophic destruction - they are all done for political purposes to hinder humanity. It's like that old hymn "we shall overcome". "It's over" and humanity and the people will win.

Hmm, my BIL works in the oil industry. In exploration. My BF and her DH are both oil industry consultants. They all reckon the 40 year prediction is about right.

humanity and the people will win.

now I've lost track of what they need to defeat. In the limit, probably the laws of physics.

'My BF and her DH are both oil industry consultants. They all reckon the 40 year prediction is about right.'

The Chief Medical Officer reckoned there was going to be a swine flu pandemic, and many doctors believed it too.

Gordon Brown said we have only 50 days left to save the planet, and many climatologists believed that too.

sorry, meant to say "climate scientists". Climatologists are probably not the same thing.

IIRC it was actually more that they had to deal with the possibility that there might be a pandemic. The probability was deemed sufficiently high that they had to plan for that eventuality.

Yes there's no certainty in anything. It's the same with climate change and global warming, but that doesn't stop them raising taxes to "save the planet".

Will they pay us all back, when they eventually say "oops, sorry, our computer models contained errors, now we're going to have global cooling instead"?

Gordon Brown said we have only 50 days left to save the planet, and many climatologists believed that too.

That is of course taken out of context - even in context it was a pretty daft statement. But GB did and said many regrettable things.

'But GB did and said many regrettable things.'

We have found an area of agreement.

MoreBeta - on a thread about a million years ago you mentioned a book called "The Prize" about the history of the oil industry.

Reading it right now (slowly, it's very long). AMAZING book. Great recommendation. Thank you

I've heard of that book. I should really read it one day. Just seen that an 8 hour documentary of the book is available on youtube.

Claig, DH is a virologist. He reckons they've been waiting for the H1N1 flu pandemic for the last 20 years. It was just luck and good planning that the flu didn't spread as much as was anticipated this year. Are you suggesting that because the Chief Medical Officer thought that, on the balance of probabilities and the available scientific evidence, that it was worth planning for the possibility of a pandemic, then it didn't happen this year, that we should then disregard everything else they say?

That's the sort of ill informed, simplicstic thinking that leads to panics. it's the sort of thing that journalists with no grounding in science use to perpetuate their scare stories. It's the sort of thing the Daily Mail would write....oh.

'He reckons they've been waiting for the H1N1 flu pandemic for the last 20 years'

Yes that's what they've been saying. They also say we have passed the "tipping point" and will face catastrophic climate change. They tell us of tidal waves and sea levels rising and whole areas of the country being submerged by water. They call it global warming. I think that is the panic.

Here's the sort of thing the Daily Mail wrote about the pandemic science

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1242147/The-false-pandemic-Drug-firms-cashed-scare-swine-flu-claims-Euro-health-chief.html

I don't think it is journalists perpetuating scare stories. That's just blaming the messenger.

Here is the ex-head of the civil sevice warning us not to believe scare stories.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2001189/Ministers-fall-climate-folly-warns-ex-Civil-Service-chief.html

H1N1 pandemic panic was certainly the creation of pharmameutical corporations. More like waiting for twenty years for the opportunity to maximise margins to coincide with the sweetest vaccine manufacture deals with governments. And the lovely no liability cherry on the top. Mmmmmmmm. Public panic. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

If they need to sell more drugs, maybe there will be more panics in the future. I don't know if the Guardian told us of Rumsfeld's links to Tamiflu, but the Mail did

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1176743/Donald-Rumsfelds-controversial-links-drug-company-Tamiflu.html

and the Mail quoted Dr Mercola

'Dr Joseph Mercola, author of The Great Bird Flu Hoax, said yesterday: ?The only thing all this talk of swine flu does is spread fear. President Bush sought to instil panic by telling us a minimum of 200,000 people will die from avian flu but it could be as bad as two million deaths in the US alone. This hoax was justified by the immediate purchase of 80million doses of Tamiflu.?

Well Claig unfortunately natural systems such as viral mutations don't follow the timelines dictated by the tabloids. To suggest that because the mutations one year weren't as devastating as feared and that the precautions the worldwide scientific community put in place to contain the outbreaks at source worked in the way that they were intended to i.e. limited the spread of a potentially devastating illness, is somehow a reason to ignore any future warnings from people whose entire professional life studying such things just serves to illustrate how dangerous it is to listen to people like you.

The last Ebola outbreak was contained using the same measures as used for the swine flu. Care to stand in the contamination zone next time simply because some arts graduate with no scientific education who doesn't understand the science writes a disparaging article in a tabloid? Go ahead. I for one will examine the evidence and consult with those with a better understanding of these things then take their professional advice.