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'Climate crisis' needs brain gain

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The most brilliant minds should be directed to solving Earth's greatest challenges, such as climate change, says Sir David King.

The former UK chief scientist will use his presidential address at the BA Science Festival to call for a gear-change among innovative thinkers.

He will suggest that less time and money is spent on endeavours such as space exploration and particle physics.

He says population growth and poverty in Africa also demand attention.

"The challenges of the 21st Century are qualitatively different from anything that we've had to face up to before," he told reporters before the opening of the festival, which is being held this year in Liverpool.

"This requires a re-think of priorities in science and technology and a redrawing of our society's inner attitudes towards science and technology."

Sir David's remarks will be controversial because they are being made just as the UK is about to celebrate its participation in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest physics experiment.

The Collider, built at the Cern laboratory under the Swiss-French border, is starting full operations this Wednesday.

It will seek to understand the building blocks of matter, and, in particular, try to find a mechanism that can explain why matter has mass.

This international venture is extremely expensive, however. The UK alone has contributed more than £500m to the LHC - the largest sum of money to date invested by a UK government in a single scientific project.

Sir David said it was time such funding - and the brains it supports - were pushed to answering more pressing concerns.

"It's all very well to demonstrate that we can land a craft on Mars, it's all very well to discover whether or not there is a Higgs boson (a potential mass mechanism); but I would just suggest that we need to pull people towards perhaps the bigger challenges where the outcome for our civilisation is really crucial."

Chief among these challenges for Sir David is the issue of climate change. When he was the government's top scientist, he made the famous remark that the threat from climate change was bigger than the threat posed by terrorism.

He said alternatives to fossil fuels were desperately needed to power a civilisation that would number some nine billion people by mid-century - nine billion people who would all expect a high standard of living.

"We will have to re-gear our thinking because our entire civilisation depends on energy production, and we have been producing that energy very largely through fossil fuels; and we will have to remove our dependence from fossil fuels virtually completely, or we will have to learn how to capture carbon dioxide from fossil fuel usage," he said.

Finding and exploiting clean energy sources was now imperative, he said; and Sir David questioned whether the spending on particle physics research in the shape of Cern's Large Hadron Collider was the best route to that goal.

He even doubted whether Cern's greatest invention was an outcome that could only have come from an institution that pursued so-called "blue skies research".

"People say to me: 'well what about the world wide web? That emerged from Cern'. Brilliant. Tim Berners Lee was the person who invented that. What if Tim Berners Lee had been working in a solar [power] laboratory? Perhaps he would have done it there as well. The spin-out would have come from the brilliant individual."
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Kati_kat

14 responses // 'Climate crisis' needs brain gain

  •  

    That's like a wordier sun article, asking why haven't "the scientist" cured cancer yet. every time some group of scientists do something a bit frivolous.

    Scientists are not this one contiguous group.
    Scientists worker better doing what they are happy doing.

    Owwmykneecap
  •  

    Attempting to direct and force scientist to research things 'the civilization needs'rather than what the scientists are inspired to research may not garner the breakthroughs Sir David desires either.

    darthophage
  •  

    Better than throwing a tennis ball into it and seeing what comes out the other side.

    BIOHAZARD
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    The reason the big things will never be fixed is simple: There's no money in it.

    If the globe warms, millions are made.
    If cancer continues, "treatments" are paid for.

    I will take something like this to finance scientists to do something worthwhile.

    By the way, for those talking about scientists doing what they love have never seen the inside of academia. Scientist will do what gets them published, because that's what advances their career, and what gets them published is highly theoretical studies about sub-sub-sub atomic bits of fuzz. Popular, real solutions won't make them renowned in the college world.

    BenLancaster
  •  

    it actually might help to know where matter comes from

    it's crucial that we figure out if the higgs boson exists

    i'm sure there are plenty of other "talented" scientists working on the green tech stuff anyway

    elegua
  •  

    The idea that there's no money in those technologies is exactly ludacris.

    Take green tech for example, that market is being monetized as we speak. The organizations, institutions and economies able to innovate and solve our "global warming" or sustainability problems are poised to make a killing in the next 10-30 years by actually "saving the world."

    After all, what happens to the price of a parachute as you approach terminal velocity while falling from an airplane? You can be sure that it explodes upward without a second thought for gravity.

    So I've just proved that market forces are all we need and that Sir King is just another stuffed shirt with a tragically transposed name, right?

    Well, not exactly...

    Imagine yourself once more, the parachuteless-parachutee, falling headfirst toward the ground from 30,000 feet and beside you a huge red arrow representing the price of the parachute (that could save your life) rocketing skyward at 200km/h and beyond.

    The question is this:

    How deep are your pockets relative to that price curve?

    Uh-oh. Did someone say spaghetti-o? Cause that's what you're about to look like. Even Bill Gates with his 10,000 foot long pockets is going to be just as messy when he hits ground...

    UNLESS...

    ...he acts fast, before the price gets too far out of control.

    So that's what the government can do: NUDGE PEOPLE TO ACT in their own self-interest before their impending doom has already overtaken them.

    As for funding in the sciences,

    Anyone that tells you she left high school biology class already determined to devote her life to the study of the aspergillus oryzae, is full of tetrahymena. You don't start a career in science "doing what you love." Because no one has a comprehensive enough understanding of their field to really grasp what it is that they "love."

    In fact, most people stumble through most of their careers, if not lives, grasping at the opportunities that blow their way rather than plotting a clear course from the get go.

    Let public funding for the particular priorities in science that Sir King believes in be the wind at our backs!
    ___

    karrer
  •  

    I think Sir King is just trying to motivate science in a direction that benefits more people.

    Take the Space Race for example. Market forces and pride (or ego) put a person on the Moon in less than 2 decades, yet right now some reports are saying some 'Green Technology' may be 4-5 decades on the horizon before it is widely usable.

    What science needs is incentive and competition!

    foresterer80
  •  

    wow, finally we have a device that will solve all the problems on the face of the earth.

    kewl.

    arcticspirit
    1 response to this
  •  

    okay, i'll respond to myself. can you say introverted? anyway, i say it's not a climate crisis. this is what science has been calling climate change for decades. if, you really think you can change global weather patterns, have at it. however i think the human race had better stick to meteorology for now- since we really dont have that quite perfected yet- and adapt to the climate changes that are coming. its sad to see all the islands go, but they are going as we speak. you cant stop nature. yes, we can stop polluting, but get real. reverse global weather patterns? that sounds really safe.

    globewatcher
  •  

    I agree with you globewatcher. It is a climate change, no crisis here for anyone but us. The earth will go on with or without...

    mookster_07
    2 responses to this
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    we are at the point where we can control the earth's constant climate change, just the politicians are too short-sighted to grow the jewels to do something about it
    1 - install solar radiation panels turbines and generators on all domestic dwellings - the excess sold back pays for the equipment and installation
    2 - let the companies that does the installation get profits from the sale of excess electric
    3 - use the excess to power business' that may not be able to adapt
    4 - no public is going to refuse free electric free equipment free maintenance
    5 - no need for nuclear - use that money to purchase/support the rain forrests

    dognamedblue

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