±«Óătv

We can expect the usual frothing at the mouth over the North Korea's announcement they are about to test a Nuclear Device. Why should this be so momentous?
There are , after all, how many US Nukes/Missiles are in S.Korea, Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific. But that'll be okay as the USA has never attacked another country, has it?
The list of those is hasn't attacked would be far shorter. They are the only nation to use nuclear weapons, and they have taken us to the brink of nuclear war on more than one occasion. They are also developing smaller nuclear devices, such as "bunker busters"- contrary to the non-proliferation treaty they signed.
It seems that any nuclear device which is a threat to US doninance is a call for sanctions and even the threat of war. How long can this state exist?

No disrespect to Martha Kearney she is excellent, but why is Jeremy Paxman not interviewing David Cameron tonight? Is this a case of Cameron refusing to be interviewed by Paxman like he refused to be interviewed by Andrew Neil? If this is the case Newsnight viewers should be told. The Telegraph Spy column implied that Gordon Brown refused to interviewed at the Labour party confererence by Jeremy Paxman and would only be interviewed by Martha Kearney, was this the case?

What is the point of talking about Climate Change without addressing what must be THE most important issue which is facing Mankind, that of the burgeoning world population!

Even if all electricity generation generation is moved to non CO2 producing type- i.e. Nuclear Generation. ( Whoever dreamt that `Renewables` could ever carry the generation load ? ) the sheer numbers of people in all countries of the world is much much more likely to be the determining factor in any changing pattern of our climate

Sandy Main

jacob rees mogg was a really poor example of who the tories should put up. In a debate about diversity and modernity in the party he was not just a dinosuar, but a diplodocus - almost unfeasibly gangly and awkward - and I am not talking about his build, but his views. So old fashioned that his fellow tory looked embarrassed by his presence and physically winced when he started to talk.

Oh dear Jurassic Cameron.

\might hsve to vote for Mrs Watsername

Just watching the POSH report on the Tory A-List and am reminded of the old Tories through the tone and language of Jacob Rees-Mogg (yes he is related to the original), to paraphrase his words; it is the role of "intellectuals [such as himself] to govern the nation and as such the demography of the Tory party will never reflect the demography of the nation nor should it." In essence upper class white males, like himself should be in charge.

I had forgotten just why the Tories are out of power (as well as out of touch).

It would seem to me, despite this A-List, the Old Boy network is alive and well here. It makes me shudder.

I am more than a little disturbed by the insinuation that candidates must have attended a 'red brick' university to be able to construct an "articulate letter to social services"
I am a conservative supporter and i worry that this direction is a step backwards not forwards.

A degree takes three of four years, common sense takes longer and, suprisingly, isnt a course offered at oxford or cambridge to my knowledge.

Seeing Jacob Rees-Mogg's tonight has made me sick to my stomach. He may be young enough to be forgiven for having an attitude like this but the Conservative Party should be ashamed.

Well done Justin Rees Mogg. He's 100% right him! This country DOES need clevver people to manage and run it. I'm fed up with spotty blokes in old Ford Mondeos turning up at my posh gate demanding I pay 2 grand in taxes when I've just paid the remaining ÂŁ170,000...EACH YEAR by the way!

Blair gets interviewed by Blue Peter.

±«Óătv Newsnight decides to test whether the questions asked are those a randomly picked school would actuallly want to ask.

The school: Villiers School.

Where is Villiers school? Southall.

Southall, which is officially (according to a widely published study out a couple of weeks ago) the LEAST ENGLISH PLACE IN ENGLAND.

They even managed to include a TOKEN WHITE BOY. But he was POLISH.

I think they managed to squeeze in the question 'Why is immigration now getting a bed press, there's nothing wrong with it?' FUNNY THAT

±«Óătv Newsnight. I reckon the editor's w*nk themselves of every night with a rolled up copy of the GUARDIAN.

Environment ministers of the world's top 20 polluters held a meeting in Mexico to discuss how to combat global warming!

They should have set a good example by having a video conference.

Unfortunately I was a bit late tuning in and thus only caught the tail end of the interview with the younger people and the so called comparison with Blue peter – bit of a joke and totally out of context as these are two completely different programmes. Putting this aside for a moment – only one of the children in your audience were white I feel that not only what a sad reflection that this is England but also what a gift you have given to the far right parties – suggest you think again and remember that this is England!

I didnt know we had a Minister for climate change until tonight. He was woefully ill prepared, lacking even basic knowledge of his brief. This illustrates what happens when political correctness drives the selection of candidates and composition of the government. I am assuming that Minister, whatwever his name was, must belong to some Labour interest or lobby group or marginal constituency or otherwise- he was hardly selected on merit. What is wrong with Rees Mogg? His aloofness, sense of dress etc may not appeal, but why should he be automatically denied access to the electorate based upon his choice of parents or university? His sister came across as more obnoxious. Theres something very new Labour about a philosophy that suggests that the thicker you are, the more deserving you may be in life generally. Jeremy was in good form tonight.

Once again, Newsnight has purveyed the lastest diversionary episode in hiding from the public the REAL consequences of Climate Chaos. It has (colluded) allowed, through the lack of critical thinking or imagination, the continuing support of the media to divert peoples attention from the radical policies that will be required to address the (now) concurrent problems of climate change and PEAK OIL. The only beneficiaries of this delay in facing reality, are the shareholders of multinational global corporations who are wanting to make as much money as possible before the oil runs out and the banks who fleece everyone all of the time.
If Mr Paxman would engage in some real questions and not his opportunistic patronising of an inept status quo, perhaps the ±«Óătv might yet stop pandering to those elitest cliques who seek to rule the people and for once, seek out the opinions of those who seek rule of the people by the people.

So Jeremy went back to school. Where were the indigious children of the UK? Thankfully we don't live in the south or a city so we do expect a more balanced view.

In reply to Liam, my criticism of young Rees-Mogg, was certainly not his dress or fey accent, but rather the profound ignorance of modern Britain as evidenced by what to me were offensive remarks about the great unwashed electorate. For the Tories to select him, says to me a lot about the real Tory party.

Concerning the Climate Change Minister, I agree, he was embarrassing in his responses, I think that Blue Peter presenter would have had this guy on the ropes.

Why are your interviewers so unctiously nice to the politicians they interview? Paxman quite rightly was robust with the Labour climate minister but Martha Kearney seemed to be having a chummy little get together with Cameron. Isn't it time the ±«Óătv stopped being nice to the young pretender and hounded him about his complete lack of policies. Is there some sort of gentlemans agreement not to hold the Tory's up too much public scrutiny? Turn over a few stones, upset someone for a change. Is it any wonder everyone is fed up with the sham that is politics in Britain today.

Martha Kearney (Oxford) and Jeremy Paxman (Cambridge) berate the Conservatives because of Oxbridge bias. How's that for Newsnight humbug?

3,4,10,13,15 - good points
21 - very good

Charlie Graham (16), please read this. The corporations want you to believe in Peak Oil but this concept is completely false. Country after country is being taken over to control oil supplies and prices, promote the opium trade, loot each country mercilessly and set up conditions for the annihilation of its people (such as the use of DU), as well as other reasons. The oil giants need people to believe in Peak oil in order that they can hype prices. There are many scientists who do not agree with the Climate change scenario and its causes. These usually lose their job as soon as they speak out. One such prominant scientist is Richard Lindzen.
Governments are the servants of the big banks and multinationals, they exist to brainwash people using a tangled web of lies.

Jeremy Paxman goes into a school, as the ±«Óătv always does, where the vast majority of the children are from ethnic minorities and they are the only ones questioned. Surprise, surprise the sort of questions they would put to the prime minister, given the opportunity, differ from those as a result of Blue Peter inviting children from across the country to write in with their questions. I don't suppose it occurred to him that their ethnicity influenced their questions and that it also explained why immigration wasn't high on their agenda. Is everyone at the ±«Óătv brainwashed?!

Jacob Rees Mogg is the future of the tory party and the reason the tory party stil has no future with the british electorate. If I had seen him on chanel four I would have assumed he was some form of inverted Ali G style characature.

Funnily enough the minister who was put up by the government actually maintained a vaguely coherent stance on the topic of climate change policy (obviously the government's position doesn't actually sit well with their rhetoric), but of course, in the face of the barrage of intellectual punches from one J Paxman with, it has to be said, a perfect performance of feigned indignance, he didn't look as though he was winning the argument: Tony Blair is at least abreast of the realpolitik of the situation -- but he doesn't "do detail" so should anyone expect anything this government does to have the flavour of true coherence.

Newsnight itself has got this issue arse-about-face, but then it is just a limp wing of the climate-consensus-propangandists set --- along with the more strident Royal Society, parts of the IPCC, all green organisations, parts of the Met Office and of course Kyoto's big daddy here on earth the UN's FCCC, not forgetting other agenda setting parts of the ±«Óătv --- so no real surprise there.

If Newsnight applied rigorous scientific argument on anything like the level it attempts to tease out political argument and not just accept each piece of research at face value as it emerges it would, for one, not countenance taking the IPCC's supposedly "most authoritative body" status on the issue any longer than Ludwig wielded a poker at Karl (just coming up to its 60th anniversary by the way): we should be listening to good testable science from wherever it originates; unsubstantiated computer simulated predictions, pah!

It is the UN's FCCC that has caused the major problem:
- They define "climate change" as essentially all down to (get this) *just* anthropogenic GHGs
- The IPCC's Working Group I (2001) define it is as anthropogenic(GHGs + LandUse) + natural(InternalForcings + ExternalImpacts)

(That the IPCC overall can get away with 3 different definitions of climate change for years is a measure of the lack of scrutiny that is applied to their auguste deliberations.)

Now, you may not all be the brightest scientific bunch in the box, but even you must be able to see this as a somewhat strange state of affairs.

We *hear* climate change in this country as a virtual synonym for global mean temperature rises caused by CO2 (and other GHGs at a push), but this is coupled with the "effects of climate change" being potentially anything (if not just about everything) **bad** that happens to the climate, anywhere.

Given that many scientists will be using a broad definition, the public are in effect being conceptually abused by the entire debate, and Newsnight should be in the forefront of elucidating just how complex climate really is.

Never again do I want to hear Susan Watts utter the phrase "we know from climate change" or "we know from global warming" (inevitably meaning "global warming theory" not merely "global mean temperature rise"). We "know" sweet FA from both: they are phenonmena or hypotheses not scientific laws, or mathematical or logical arguments.

Assuming the consensus hold sway for at least a few more years, it is in fact a potential double whammy: not only will governments be spending lots of cash "sorting out" molecules of CO2 that are actually relatively benign, BUT they'll be missing the bigger picture, namely what all the
other dimensions of climate are really warning us about: to look at our ways of thriving well within a changing environment.

By the way that "10 year" figure ought to be updated as it was first uttered about a year ago.

And the curves depicted in your report seem more like those aimed at the Blue Peter audience, maybe not linear thinking, but very much quadratic: haven't these people heard climate is a complex system (in the technical mathematical sense)?

Roger A Pielke Jr (University of Colorado), whilst defending the IPCC Working Group I, does think the debate needs to get more sophisticated:

1) Expose the gerrymandering of the climate change issue at the international level (particularly UN FCCC) by demanding broad definitions of climate change that reflect proper scientific discussion of the subject.

2) Develop new environmental and technological climate policies that address short-to-medium human and environmental vulnerabilities, which are there regardless of future warming or cooling, whilst acknowlegding that the reason insurance costs are rising for environmental damage is at least partly a function of increased wealth tied up within infrastructure and riskier behaviour when it comes to land use. [This is part of the adaptation argument that Frances Cairncross raised recently.]

3) Develop a longer term climate/technological policy addressing emissions. I would say: greater use of solar and other sustainable/emission-free power generation, together with significantly greater use (for example) of partly or wholly electrically powered transport and associated infrastructure.

But just fronting with a report that merely regurgitates the bog-standard consensus perspective is no good to anyone and what will probably turn out to be modest economic analysis doesn't really address the fundamentals.

Come on, come on Newsnight, get a grip!

Jacob Rees-Mogg couldn't be any more patrician. I'm surprised that the Tories were wise enough to leave him out of the A-List. His sister could be called patrician as well, if it wasn't for the fact that she was female. Aside from trying to lose the nasty tag, the Tories also need to appear less patrician and the key to doing this is to choose people on the basis of their attitude (i.e. more comfortable with modern Britain, less WASP-focused and a lot more humble) rather than their background.

Political parties are obviously in the business of winning elections and I would guess that the parties wouldn't fight elections unless they thought themselves the best people for the job. However, the Tories innate delusion that they were born to rule (they don't say it, but it comes across in attitude of people like Jacob Rees-Mogg) is frankly aristocratic in nature and no amount of GWB Juice Bars can hide the fact that the party and what it stands for belongs in the 1950s.

Hate to sound selfish about the water crisis, but as a wine grower in the UK I have never had it so good.Global warning has produced bumper grape crops in the UK and we can compete effectively with Australia because they have suffered quite badly from the freak heat.Sorry about all the polar bears,but I suppose every cloud has a silver lining.

We are too fixated with economics to realise how easy it is too solve Climate Change. We have the knowledge, the inventions, the capabilities, but somehow because we haven’t got the money we cannot progress. Wrong, we have the money its a manmade commodity, ok it doesn’t grow on trees as is famously said, but it is a paper based commodity which can be made to order on an infinite basis, as long as the resources are available in its manufacture.

We wrote off the debts of third world countries and rightly so. If we can realise the importance of wiping out repayments of billions from these countries we can also provide billions to eco companies to solve the greatest threat mankind has ever faced since the last supervolcano 70,000 years ago and wipe out their debts too.

Take a step back from how we govern our lives, take this bold radical approach, face reality, break this trend of economics and finance and solve the issues that matter before it’s too late.

Money is manmade, climate change is manmade, poverty is due to lack of money, money can help reduce climate change and poverty - discuss.

Perhaps someone could remind the good folks at Newsnight that political parties don't choose MPs; The British electorate does!

So there are few people of Scottish, Northern English or Welsh origin as serving Conservative MPs? Maybe that's because none have been elected in those regions? Newsnight could have made the same argument, in reverse, about the Labour party - not many Southeast or Southwest or shire county MPs. Or is Newsnight suggesting that instead of putting up local candidates, parties should bus prospective candidates all over the country so as to make up the necessary quotas?

Lame Newsnight, Lame.

Oh, and please tell Paxo that taxing the British Public to death is not going to 'solve' 'global warming'. Perhaps he is aware that there are other countries in the world? That put out far more pollution!

Lame Jeremy, Lame.

Earlier in the evening we were informed by a tory candidate that 95% of the UK population is white. Therefore, I wonder why there was such a disproportionate selection of children in the studio. They were charming children, erudite and intelligent, but only one, a little blond boy in glasses represented the 95% white population. Why this prejudice against the white race? Was it intentional or were there a lack of children ready and capable of participating?

nopointinwatching wrote:
Charlie Graham (16), please read this. The corporations want you to believe in Peak Oil but this concept is completely false.

Now I'm just a geologist with experience in petroleum geology so I might not know everything - but I have to say 'What????'

Oil is a fossil fuel which accumulates at a tiny fraction of the rate it is being extracted, therefore supplies *must* run down. It's like kids grabbing sweets out of a box, at first they can all take handfuls of sweets without problems, but sooner or later they start getting fewer sweets. Making the box bigger only delays the point at which the tears begin.

We don't know just how big the oil container is. There are a number of constraints on knowing when this will be - the price of oil which is linked largely to demand (currently almost insatiable), competition from other fuels (almost zero), but mainly it's the total amount of oil down there. We pretty much know the physical constraints on oil creation - the type of sediments, burial depths, time, etc. so we can make a crude (ahem) guess of the regions of the World that have oil potential. We know the maximum depth at which oil is found before geothermal heat turns it to gas, we know how it is trapped in geological structures. So we can build an accurate map of where oil is *likely* to accumulate. And the result is, we've actually looked in most of those places. Only very deep continental shelves are not thoroughly explored and their reserves are likely to be more limited than thought ten years ago.

Peak oil says at some point production must begin a general decline - it might not be a nice sharp peak like the Hubbert predictions; there might be a plateau or a series of peaks and troughs, but sooner or later that production graph will go down and down.

The Hubbert peak has been proven time and time again in individual fields, regions (the North Sea being a textbook example) and continents (United States); therefore it is a good model of how oil production proceeds. The Hubbert curve for global production shows us somewhere near the top of the curve with some experts saying we may have topped production in the last year or so.

For most of the twentieth century oil reserves were discovered faster than they were exploited; we kept piling on the reserves; but the long term trend was always for new reserves to accumulate at a slower rate. Annual rates of discovery between 1925 and 1950 were in the range of 800-900 million barrels per year. After this it declined to a general 240-300 million barrels per year up until 1980, with a terrifying decline to an average of 47-80 million barrels through to 2004.

This doesn't mean that large fields aren't being found, they're just being found less often - the recent discovery of the Jack 2 field in the Gulf of Mexico is an example; it has reserves of between 3 and 15 billion barrels - so it is a giant; BUT the previous 'elephant' in the US was the Prudhoe Bay Alaskan field discovered as long ago as 1968. And it is well worth noting that Jack 2 will probably only ever produce 400,000 barrels of oil per day (US demand is around 20 million barrels per day) - about the same amount of oil as production from Mexico's superfield Cantarell *declined* last year.

From about 1984 onwards we've been discovering less oil than we've been using. We've been eating into our reserves; today over 80% of oil production comes from fields discovered before 1970. Between 2000 and 2005 there were about 2,700 oil and gas discoveries around the World, adding about 120 billion barrels to global reserves. During the same time, we used more than 300 billion barrels of oil with an accelerating rate of consumption. Going back to our kiddies and sweets analogy, we've got more kids and this time they're using shovels to grab the sweets. This isn't a new trend, it's been going on for over twenty years now and the deficit is getting worse.

The scary fact is we can't even be sure of some of those reported reserves - in the 1980s OPEC members massively uprated their reserves. OPEC allocates production quotas based on reported reserves, so it is in countries interests to report high reserves. Kuwait went from 64 billion to 92 billion barrels, Iran 47 billion to 93 billion and the UAE went from 31 billion to 92 billion barrels! OPEC added over 40% to its reported reserves without a single major new discovery.

None of these countries will allow independent assessment of their reserves, so we might be in a worse situation than we thought. Saudi Arabia is a good example here, traditionally it has been a swing producer, able to pump more oil when needed, but in the last few years it has been unable to add much to its 10 million barrels per day - it keeps promising to add another 2 - 5 million barrels per day, but that is proving elusive - not terribly unexpected when most Saudi fields are more than 40 years old and need huge injections of water to force the oil out. There are persistant reports of problems in the massive Ghawar field which produces more than half of Saudi oil (5% of global production); problems that are typical of fields nearing the end of their life.

With rising demand, a lower rate of discovery and declining spare capacity it is inevitable that peak oil production is in sight.

the world hasn't got a chance with regard to climate change. the un can hardly agree on how to prevent genocide in darfur how are the big "beast" pollution producing countries going to agree to cut down on emissions. watching the minister for the environment sliding around evasively avoiding saying what was being done while pointing out common agreement would need to be in place before anything could be done made me think there is not an ice cubes chance in hell or a humans chance on earth of anything being done in time.

The amount the UK Government is investing in renewables is pitiful. The Minister was able to point to ÂŁ100 million/year for "renewables" and the renewables obligation (which applies only to our electricity supply - one third of current energy use and emissions, transport being another third and heat the other) adding up to ÂŁ1 billion by 2010 (meanwhile Jeremy points our Iraq has cost us over ÂŁ4 billion). Renewable energy technologies exist now to address emissions from transport and heat but they receive very little recognition and even less funding - less than ÂŁ1 million/ year for solar heating. Why don't we have a Minister for Energy and Climate Change in Cabinet accountable for carbon emissions (which are currently growing)?

I have nothing more to add about poor old fashioned Jason Rees-Mogg, except to say I am surprised David Cameron has not got a 'B' list to vet candidates that can! appear on Television. It scares me to to know that he thinks a 62% increase in private education admissions is evidence that as he said ''the socialist state education system is not working''. Scarier still, is he thinks stating the things he does makes him look intelligent.

David Cameron has done a lot to modernise the party for which I am grateful. However, I do have some reservations with the direction we are going in. I can overlook the lack of policies for th time being - though I would like to see some meat on bones soon. My biggest doubt is the A list. I must agree with Jacob Rees-mogg that those best suited and educated should be selected for seats and selection should not be based on gender, sexual orientations or race.
Watching 'The Politics Show' on sunday, I see I am not alone in this view. The councillor from Medway echoes my concerns when he says to get selected "you should chop off a leg so you're disabled, declare yourself gay and have a word with Michael Jackson about changing your colour."
I want to vote for the best candidate not someone foisted on me by a newly politically correct central office.
As I said, I think David Cameron has done a lot of good for the party but I feel Jacob Rees-Mogg represents the true views of true tories...like me

Mogg was a grotesque caricature in need of repackaging, but so was Newsnight's implied criticism of Oxbridge.The media has a fatal fascination with portraying Oxbridge as a glorified finishing school,as synonymous with upper class privilege as gymkhanas or point to points.The oxbridge entrance exam is open to anybody from Belgravia to Yorkshire.In France the meritocratic elite of the Grandes Ecoles dominates politics-but no Frenchman would think of it with a nod and a wink.Heaven forbid that these issues should become muddied-definitely not cricket.

I didn't see the programme but my boss did and he has asked me to get in contact with the professor who was interviewed about climate change on the programme. I am unable to watch the programme on the website as our computers don't allow it and we don't have sound either. Please can someone who saw the programme let me know the name of the professor who was interviewed? with thanks. Tina

Jeremy had obviously taken note of that old adage about never working with animals or children.The children may not have been rehearsed exactly,but they seemed rather well briefed.The most genuine comment came from the boy who was worried about sugary snacks being banned in school and he was just waved aside.Not all children appreciate Jamie Oliver-style basil and oregano infused meals,and nor does this irritated 45 year old working mother who has to search for fresh ingredients on the hoof because of the nanny state.

Well..i was one of the students on news night and just for the record the white boy was english...his names andrew, and none of us were briefed about anything, we were told that j.p will intimidate us but thats it! I mean if we were do you honestly think that girl would talk about immigration i mean where did her parents come from...or just look around southall, it wouldn't be the place it is without its immigrants! and yes we would love it if jamie oliver came into our school, the food is rubbish!