EArlier this year, I received an email from a reader asking background questions on an article that I had written more than four decades ago. Given the time difference, my memory was blurred. To be honest, it was almost nonexistent. So I was intrigued – then surprised when I read the functionality.
I had written on the British glaciologist John Mercer, author of a 1978 Nature paper in which he warned that the continuation of the increases in the consumption of fossil fuels would cause quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Global temperatures could increase by 2C in the middle of the 21st century, causing major ice loss of ice and threatening an increase of 5 meters from sea level, he warned.
Today, temperatures are 1.5 ° C driver that they were at the time pre -industrial and sea level increase at an acceleration rate. And, as Mercer also predicted, global warming has its greatest impact on the poles. The ice disappears, threatening to flood the coastal areas populated by the earth with cast iron water and compromise the capacity of the planet to reflect solar radiation in space. Additional temperature increases are likely to ensue.
Mercer was not the first scientist to warn that our world was confronted with a greenhouse future, but his article, with his very specific forecasts, was my first exposure to a detailed examination of the concept. At the end of the 1970s, most climatic fears were focused in the media on the arrival of a new ice age. MERCER – Then based at the Institute of Polar Studies of Ohio State University – predicted the opposite. Ours would be a warm and humid future, he insisted. This dark forecast has since been taken up by a number of scientists who have added their own increasingly urgent warnings to the dangers posed by our Change the climate. I had a hard time saving them in the Observer – often to choirs orchestrated with hostile responses of climate change negatives – and to clearly indicate that our dependence fossil fuels will have dangerous consequences for our planet.
There remains the most striking scientific history I have covered As a scientific editor of the newspaper Over the past 42 years, even if I should also give credit to the multitude of other remarkable developments that have occurred during this period and which have been the subject of my reports. These include our growing mastery of DNA science, the creation of mobile phones and computers, our capacity to improve the scourge of cancer and the discovery that Homo sapiens have a African origin. I listed the protruding facts below this piece, and each demonstrates how dedicated researchers have transformed our understanding of our universe and our place since the 1980s.
Their impacts nevertheless seem insignificant compared to that which will occur if our interference with the climate of our planet continues at its current rate. It is quite simply a great scientific experience, ever undertaken by humans. Our emissions continuously increasing the greenhouse gases modify the earth – with our own species intended to be the main test subject.
Melt glacial caps, flooding the coastal plains, droughts, serious storms and heat waves threaten to move hundreds of millions of people from their country of origin as the large pieces of our planet become uninhabitable. “In such a future, we will not provoke anything less than the collapse of the living world – the very thing on which our civilization is based,” said Sir David Pantal In A life on our planet.
Our scientific creativity and ingenuity could surely help us face the upcoming devastation, we could expect that we certainly have the intellectual capacity to stop the changes that await us. Unfortunately, my experiences as editor in science suggest the opposite – because just as I looked at the breathtaking advances in science, I saw large parts of society turn my head and deliberately reject the truths presented to them. The rise of unreason was the unwanted partner of our growing scientific sophistication.
My first serious meeting with the anti-science denial came with the arrival of AIDS in the 80s. Scientists traced the cause: a virus now known as HIV What he said, is sexually transmitted. This point was challenged by many people who said it had been caused by “defective” lifestyles and denied that AIDS was caused by a virus. This must have had a devastating international impact after the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, asked several AIDS negators to join his presidential advisory panel on the disease. The general restraint of AIDS treatments followed in South Africa, where the number of deaths of the disease has reached hundreds of thousands of people.
An even more surprising example is provided by COVID. Our understanding of the disease gradually changed after its appearance at the end of 2019, and the advice was modified as scientists learned more about its causes. Hand washing has been abandoned like a mantra and staying outside has become acceptable. This uncertainty was provided by social media.
Then came the vaccines, and the Internet entered overdrive. The immunization against Covid was linked to an exaggerated number of deaths, and the subject was politicized, especially in the United States, where many republicans supported by Trump decided to flee the vaccine. The result was a dark distortion of the responses to the infections cowped in the United States, with many republican counties with fervor with significantly higher mortality rates compared to strong Democrats.
This affront to reason continued. The United States now has a outspokenness vaccine skeptic as health secretary While cases of measles, a disease formerly defeated by vaccines, returns in increasing number, as well as early death relationships, because the influence of anti-Vaxxers takes a grip of the country.
In the case of the climate crisis, denial was durable, pernicious and very inaccurate. The claims that scientists have played facts are not founded while the warnings of climate experts, from John Mercer, proved to be very precise. Consequently, we are now holding at the threshold of continuous increase in global temperatures – because the negators have been so effective in blocking progress towards the introduction of international agreements to limit emissions of fossil fuel.
The anti -science movements have always been with us, of course – from the rise of flat earthlings to the early establishment of groups opposed to evolution. However, the current trajectory now becomes extremely disturbing, the United States providing the most disturbing examples.
“It is undoubtedly political and linked to the rise of law in the United States,” said Sir Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society. “It is partly because Trump and many Republicans are of significant importance on elite universities in the United States, and these are places where great science takes place.
“On the other hand, the recent rise of right-wing parties in European countries has not been reflected by the mistreatment of science, and so far, the worst of this horror has not yet struck in the United Kingdom. It is not something to be taken for granted in the coming years, however. ”
The breakthroughs
DNA In 1982, when I joined the ObserverResearch on deoxyribonucleic acid, the material from which our genes are manufactured, was to its stammerings. Today, we can sequence all the genomes of individual men and women, revealing treasures of biological data that have revolutionized medical practice. Medico-legal science has also been transformed by the development of the DNA digital imprint while our understanding of our own evolution has been turned by our ability to sequence the DNA of the remains of tissue left by our predecessors. Among the breakthroughs made in this way was the discovery that we once expressed with our extinguished evolutionary cousins, the NeanderthalAnd that their DNA represents 1 to 2% of the genomes of people of European or Asian descent.
Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein, who nevertheless thought that they could not be detected on earth. He argued that these undulations in the space -time continuum – although generated by extremely energetic events – would dissipate to a tiny fraction of their original scale when they reached the earth. However, in 2015, the researchers – in Louisiana and Washington – managed to detect the gravitational waves generated by the fusion of two black holes using giant laser interferometers capable of measuring wavelengths with a precision of a few hundred billion billions of dollars by one meter. This success has since opened a whole new way to study the universe.
The web When I started working as a journalist, we hit our stories about manual writing machines and, when they are out of the office, phoned in our stories to take human copies. The creation of mobile phones, internet and powerful personal computers has since transformed mass communication thanks to developments in a multitude of techniques, including nanotechnology of semiconductors, sensors, fiber optics, satellites and atomic clocks. Today, a mobile phone has a processing power and a memory capacity which are millions of times more powerful than the computer that guided the Apollo 11 mission on the Moon.
Out of Africa Forty years ago, those who studied human origins were divided into two groups. One side argued that modern humans have evolved separately from the predecessors found in different areas around the world. The other group said that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa before spreading outside the continent to take over the planet. The first theory was known as the multi -regional hypothesis while the second was called the theory outside of Africa. Detailed studies on fossils, old DNA and stone tools and other artefacts have since solved the problem, and we now know that the latter theory is correct. Essentially, we are all Africans under the skin.
The James Webb space telescope Forty years ago, men and women soon had to install colonies on the Moon and Mars. However, human space flight has since undergone financial setbacks and a decrease in public interest. On the other hand, the creation of sophisticated robot probes transformed the study of heavens, a trend which led to the launch in 2021 of the most powerful observatory in the world, the James Webb space telescope. He now reveals the universe by unrivaled details with early results showing that the universe was already deep in the process of stars formation only shortly after his birth of Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.