Pachauri & Lomborg: eco-politics of climate change
Seema Singh -
Saturday, July 04, 2009 1:31 AM
The ambience was perfect-the flower island of Mainau in Lake Constance in southern Germany -- to debate the subject of ‘sustainability and climate change' with some 600 students, media persons and 23 Nobel laureates.
The panel couldn't have been better with the IPCC chairman RK Pachauri, atmospheric chemist and Nobel winner Mario Molina, German minister or science, education and research Q Thielen, Copenhagen business school professor (and often the contrarian stance holder) Bjorn Lomborg and others.
Pachauri (left) and Lomborg
And we finally got to hear what many in the developing world have been waiting to hear - Pachauri taking a stance publicly (he said - ‘I make a statement here.') on the developed world making deeper cuts in carbon emissions.
"The developed world never had to pay a price (in terms of emission costs) for economic development which the developing world is now facing," he said.
It was as much a battle of wits as of facts. And a discussion which surprisingly began with Lomborg agreeing with Pachauri (they almost never agree on climate issues) and others on the seriousness of climate change soon had them in disagreement. Opinions flew thick and fast with the moderator Geoffrey Carr, science editor of The Economist, mocking the global investment in fusion research and Bern University professor Thomas Stocker critiquing the efforts of geo-engineering.
Funnily, those folks didn't realize that several stalwarts of basic research were right there in the audience. And before anyone could react, Roger Tsien, winner of 2008 chemistry Nobel, picked up the microphone: (pix below) in defense of basic research.
Roger Tsien
Merely expecting "smart" technologies is not enough, he said, referring to the denigration of fusion and geo-engineering research. "When quantum mechanics was developed nobody knew that it'd become inevitable for environmental science," Tsien said.
In fact, 2005 Nobel winner Richard Shrock from MIT had earlier spoken about how basic research in chemistry would help the much-sought after artificial photosynthesis to split water into hydrogen and water.
((I wondered if Indian chemists had any such research roadmap. Of all the basic science disciplines in India, chemistry is taken up by the largest number of students. Do you know why? "It's cheap to study chemistry [in comparison to biology or physics]," chemistry professor Gautam Desiraju of Hyderabad University once told me.))
Coming back to the discussion, those like Lomborg felt nothing much would be achieved in Copenhagen, and "we'll waste 10 more years"; but Pachauri sounded optimistic. The world has changed since Kyoto and the public pressure would force the politicians to come to a consensus.
Molina, the polite scientist whose life has not been the same since he discovered the ozone hole 25 years ago, was convincing everybody that it's not right to confuse climate change with global warming -- the former is about irreversible changes to the climate like altering the arctic ice, Himalayan glaciers or thermohaline circulation in the oceans.
As the meeting came to a conclusion today, it raised more questions than it could answer. Nothing unusual in a climate change debate I guess!