Robyn Williams: Sound familiar? Show us your lump of coal, Mister. What have we been discussing? North Sea oil. I've had furious arguments in the House of Lords, we've been discussing energy.

You went for the big installations, you went for the megawatt stations and all this sort of thing, you settle for the short-term and often it's not even for the short-term. Now, the serious choices, you know like putting up a windmill or putting on solar heating and so on, this was below contempt, you know, this was something that you didn't do anything about. The salesmanship of science is likely to persuade politicians to make the wrong choices because they are the gimmick choices. We've been in this game, some of us, in the UN and elsewhere, for all that time, but the people that came up with the ideas couldn't influence the politicians, the politicians were highly sceptical. There is nothing that we are now discussing with such alarm and despondency as a result of the oil situation that we weren't discussing over the last 25, 30 years. Peter Ritchie-Calder: In 1963 we were talking in the Rome conference, the UN conference, on new sources of energy, which is rather sardonic because we weren't talking about atomic energy at all, we were talking about the older sources of energy, which is the Sun and the wind and the water and geothermal energy. His complaint? We've been warning about this since 1963, and here we are in 1975 and you've still done nothing. Robyn Williams: Professor Ritchie-Calder, then spokesman on energy in the UK House of Lords. Now, this is a very serious matter, and to me there is no question that our climate has changed. Remember, this is coming out of the bowels of the Earth, and now we are taking it out and we're throwing it back into the atmosphere, and into the climatic machine, into the weather machine, where it is beginning to affect the climate itself.

On the present trends the accumulated requirements between now and 2000 AD will come out as something like 11,000 million tonnes of coal a year, 200,000 million tonnes of crude petroleum and liquid natural gas, and 50 million million cubic metres of natural gas. Peter Ritchie-Calder: In the course of the last century, we've put 360,000 million tonnes of fossil carbon into the atmosphere. Robyn Williams: Hello again and welcome to a rather unusual Science Show as RN celebrates books, we shall also do so, and reflect on the deaths of two hugely important writers 20 years ago.īut here note the warnings on this program 46 years of age this week of Lord Ritchie-Calder in Science Show number one.

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