Author: David Bradley

A panel of eighteen apparently maverick thinkers was charged with coming up with a to-do list for the twenty-first century by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The maverick panel includes such notables as former director of the National Institutes of Health Bernadine Healy, Google co-founder Larry Page, geneticist and businessman Craig Venter, Nobel Chemistry Laureate Mario Molina, climate change expert Rob Socolow, and ‘futurist’ Ray Kurzweil.

I am sure some of these sci-celebs are mavericks in their own way, but if that’s the case why do some entries on their list of 14 technological challenges for our age read like the section headings from a college student essay or worse still a beauty pageant winner’s wishlist?

• Engineering better medicines
• Advancing health informatics
• Providing access to clean water
• Providing energy from fusion
• Making solar energy economical
• Restoring and improving urban infrastructure
• Enhancing virtual reality
• Reverse engineering the brain
• Exploring natural frontiers
• Advancing personalized learning
• Developing carbon sequestration methods
• Managing the nitrogen cycle
• Securing cyberspace
• Preventing nuclear terror

Okay, don’t get me wrong, world peace and universal wellness are noble aims and avoiding nuclear terror should be a priority. Moreover, even beginning to approach some of these problems will take a maverick or two, and many will probably remain intractable well beyond the twenty-first century. Despite advances in functional MRI, I don’t think we’re that close to reverse engineering the brain, for instance. We are really not going to come close to “managing” the nitrogen cycle any time soon either; we cannot yet make perfectly accurate weather or climate forecasts let alone find ways to control the global flux of atmospheric gases.

Another worrying property of the list is that in some sense a few of the entries are redundant. If we have access to solar power, why would we need fusion power? Even if we get to grips with fusion, building fusion reactor power stations is going to be incredibly expensive and difficult to do at least compared to the solar option. Some people would argue that CO2 is not an issue and others would suggest that the threat of nuclear terrorism is not what the scaremongers would have us believe, so maybe those list entries are also redundant.

Socolow admits in an interview that the challenge of coming up with 14 must-do technological developments was “crazy”. “We came up with broad categories of the challenges that lie ahead and within those categories identified specific initiatives,” he says.

The panel didn’t actually rank the 14 challenges in any particular order. It was obviously a tough call to decide whether advancing health informatics is any more or less important than advancing personalized learning. However, preventing nuclear terror should come well above reverse engineering the brain and perhaps even above engineering better medicines, surely?

Likewise, enhancing virtual reality and exploring natural frontiers will allow humanity to advance way beyond the claustrophobic confines of our current mindset, but if millions of people are without clean water, then we might as well be in the dark ages.

Apparently, the panel released its report in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), so I suspect it was more than a little tongue in cheek in some respects, especially given some of the personal reports I’ve heard from fellow science journalists about the quality (or lack thereof) of this year’s meeting.

Polar bears are not quite the enormous white climate canary of frozen climes that we have been led to believe. In fact, they’re more likely to turn out to be the elephant in the room, when in fifty years time their numbers have grown despite Gory warnings.

Anyway, in the spirit of being contrary almost for the sake of it, but more seriously for the sake of science, I’d like your thoughts on the following article. It was published on ScienceandPublicPolicy.org, which is controversial enough, with the organisation’s Chief Science Advisor being Willie Soon, who along with Sally Baliunus, suggests that climate change is down to non-anthropogenic phenomena.

Anyway, the SPPI article highlights how some scientists have apparently now broken ranks to proclaim that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is not quite the forceful climate change driver those who advocate a global carbon tax would have us believe. After all, if George W Bush is suddenly on-message when it comes to the environment, then something is surely wrong with the world. Of course, I’d want the full insider details and to know if there are any conflicts of interest before taking any refusenik too seriously.

The post’s author Jerry Carlson suggests that a brave journalist who stands up against the carbon conspiracy might be in line for a Pulitzer by 2010. There are a few out there who are making waves including at least one NYT writer, he tells us. Carlson suggests that in order to take the Prize, that enterprising investigative journo will have to find answers to an intriguing pair of questions. I’m sure the folks at RealClimate.org will be readying their riposte right now, if they haven’t already, but here are Carlson’s queries for the record:

First, he asks, why don’t those who suggest we reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions and sequester carbon ever mention the enormous opportunities for feeding the world that might come from longer growing seasons and higher carbon availability for crops? Historically, civilisation has seemingly thrived when the climate has been warmer and wetter and agriculture more prolific. One might also tack on to the CO2 question the issue of water vapour being a much broader and potent greenhouse gas than CO2 as well as a dozen other apparently unaddressed issues within the climate change models.

The second Pulitzer-winning question Carlson offers is: Why is the IPCC’s projected future global warming almost linear or accelerating, when it is well-known that the greenhouse-gas impact of CO2 fades sharply with each incremental increase of CO2 in the atmosphere?

My own additional question to IPCC would ask about that 10% uncertainty in their initial report that suggested we are 90% certain that humans are responsible for rising temperature trends. 9 to 1 against is long odds, but not lottery impossible and mean that there is a chance (albeit just one in ten) that our carbon emissions are not to blame. If they’re not to blame, then rather than asking what is perhaps it’s time we checked the climate change data and took a more rigorous look at the historical and prehistorical trends, before it’s too late.

We live in an ice age, by definition; there is ice at the poles and that defines it as such. But, despite measurable volume changes in the Arctic ice sheet, NASA satellite images show without doubt that the ice cap is growing. Couldn’t that cause cooling because of increased reflectance? It has been said before, but what if we actually manage to reduce CO2 levels only to discover that the earth’s natural cycle is about to take us into a deeper ice age? We’ll regret meddling with atmospherics if it does. But, at least the growing polar bear population will be happy.

The ongoing quest for bigger, better, smaller, faster gadgets and other consumer products is not environmentally sustainable and must be replaced by an approach to design that builds on the products of contemporary mass-produced culture by re-working them for current desires. That is the simple message offered by Stuart Walker of the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Canada, currently Co-Director of Imagination@Lancaster at Lancaster University, UK, writing in the current issue of the International Journal of Sustainable Design.

Walker points out that it is critical that we address issues of sustainability more substantially than has been done to date. The throwaway culture of the mp3 generation is not only filling landfills with mass-produced and almost disposable products, but wasting vast quantities of potentially recoverable materials, including precious metals. Moreover, the continued greed for novelty means that countless perfectly useful gadgets and other products are being discarded in favour of the next version much sooner than they need be given the robustness of many well-designed products today.

He adds that if design is to contribute to human culture in a more meaningful way then it has to move beyond the often shallow, style-based notions of product design that have become so prevalent over the last 50 years.

If the creation of new products is part of the problem rather than the solution to sustainability in a world of climate change, overburdened landfills and dwindling supplies of inexpensive mineral resources, then does the designer have a role if consumerist society were to desist from its quest for novelty?

“On the face of it, and within the conventional parameters of product design, it would seem that the answer would be no,” says Walker, “or at most, relatively little.” However, he suggests that a broadening of definitions of what design involves could lead to a new generation in design that exists not simply to create novel products but to use the creative skills of individuals to re-work old products.

Walker takes as a case in point the “old-fashioned” stereo radio-cassette player, which had its heyday in the ghetto blasters of the 1980s. Countless ghetto blasters will have hit landfills in the decades since and yet, with a little imagination, a once prized possession could become a new outlet for a portable mp3 player with a simple rewiring of the input circuitry.

Such re-purposing may not be fashionable, there is not at present any cachet nor retro-chic associated with the ghetto blaster as generation after generation of sleek touch-sensitive portable media gadgets hit the market month in, month out. And yet it would take only a few cultural innovators seeing the potential of this and other examples for rebuilding and repurposing to lead to a consumer tipping point in which such a primal approach to recycling became the height of fashion. Being an early adopter need not mean buying the latest gadget, it could simply mean repurposing an old one.

More information on Walker’s potentially revolutionary proposals can be found in “Extant objects: designing things as they are” Int. J. Sustainable Design, 2008, 1, pp 4-12

You can leave ideas for other potentially retro chic repurposed gadgets and products in the comment form below.