We learn about Sir David King, former UK Chief Scientist making a remarkably stupid point in the BBC report, “Climate Crisis needs brain gain”. He really doesn’t seem to understand how innovation works:
“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.”
He wonders; “What if Tim Berners-Lee were working in a Solar Power laboratory?
Well, Sir King, then we’d have neither solar cells or the world wide web. Intelligence isn’t fungible like oil; you can’t just pour it into a tanker and move it to another field. If anything, it may be impossible to solve the climate crisis without the collaborative properties enabled by the World Wide Web. And space exploration has let us learn about the climate on other worlds, and put instruments in a position to gather vital data from our own. To say nothing of spinoff energy and materials’ technologies.
I have no idea what practical use the LHC will turn out to be; maybe nothing. But it’s 10 billion dollars, or just about a month of funding the Iraq war. Seems like a small price for a chance to pull back the curtain on physical reality. There’s no telling where that knowledge could lead.
King also appears to be assuming there are a fixed number of great scientists in the world. But billions of people toil in poverty. How many of them are potential physicists, chemists, biologists, or computer scientists? Do something about the poverty.
I agree we need to prioritize climate research. Simply observing that environmental catastrophe is a national defense issue should do the trick. If you think Al Queda is a threat to our civilization, just wait until you see what Mother Nature can do when you really get her pissed off. That should open the spigots of Pentagon funding and push things along a bit.
But the main issue isn’t even technological; it’s social. We already have the technologies to solve most of the climate crisis. We also have a population that doesn’t understand it is real; wouldn’t walk 20 steps to recycle an aluminum can and save 700 watt-hours. That’s the “bigger problem” King should be thinking about. In some ways, a much tougher problem to solve.
“We also have a population that doesn’t understand” ….
There you have it. One of my favourite observers of the human mosaic is Anthony Bourdain. No really, don’t laugh!
On his trip to Columbia on No Reservations, he visited Medellin and noted the drug violence is now nearly non-existent. The major reason?
Education. The ciry’s education budget now pours about 40% into education. Youth (and their parents) now have hope.
HG Wells said: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” (and variations of that idea)
He also said: “In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.” In other words, giving the catastrophe a 50-year head start.
You got it. Until the full benefits of conservation, ephemeralization, and just plain sensible usage of resources are realized, everything else is pie-in-the-sky procrastination.
It really is the hardest part in many walks of life, motivating people to care about something. Ask a teacher about college students. Unless the student is interested in the subject it’s an uphill battle getting them to participate. And then I hear a fair majority of those same students complain about the teacher. Same thing with climate crisis.