Gates on Global Warming: "Less of a Problem Than I Thought"

On a related topic, Barron's Tech Trader Daily posts a sampling of comments "a relaxed and animated Gates" made to a small group of reporters today at CES. Besides revealing that "Gates usually drives himself to work. Mostly in a Lexus" (no sound system specified — but this does give Toyota and Ford one more thing to talk about), Eric Savitz relays Gates' enigmatic remarks on the dangers (or not) of CO2-driven climate change:

Gates on global warming, a subject on which he previously expressed concern: "It's less of a problem than I thought." Gates laughed when asked to explain whether it was a matter of the problem being less severe than he thought, or whether the solution was easier than he previously thought, and said instead the answer was too complicated to address in a brief chat.

"He did refer the group to two books on the subject," adds Savitz: John Houghton's Global Warming and The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills.

Preempting the conspiracy theorists, we'll assume Gates' new view has nothing to do with Al Gore's role as Senior Advisor to Google.