(Today’s progress has been hampered by a dead laptop, but I am now fully functional again thanks to very kind colleagues.)
The plenary session on Monday, already alluded to on this blog, was given by Susan Solomon. She is from NOAA, and has a list of academic honours as long as my arm. Longer, actually. Her talk was nothing to do with materials science, but had a very relevant message to the throng of materialosi.
Solomon, a co-chair of working group 1 of the IPCC, spelled out in detail the reasons why the world is warming and will continue to do so, and the consequences of such warming. And for those of you freezing in London (I hear it is cold there) please don’t think that a warmer future will be a more pleasant one: Drought; increased rainfall; more extreme weather events; rising sea levels, the list of catastrophe that will follow continued rising carbon dioxide levels is a long one.
So, what has this to do with a materials science conference? As i said: nothing much. That isn’t materials science. But the key thing, and this is evident from leafing through the programme for the meeting, is that materials scientists have the power and knowledge to develop some of the new technologies that will help to curb, if not reverse the effects of increased carbon dioxide emissions. “I have before me the people who have the solution,” said Solomon. “I’m hoping that one of you is going to come up with a miracle.”
These words were ringing round my head this afternoon, whilst sitting in talks learning about surface plasmon polaritons and how they can change the properties of silicon, or how red light can be converted to more useful blue and green light in a solar cell. These are hard physics problems, of which more later, but the brain cells are greatly helped by knowing that the ultimate goal is to make a really efficient system that can produce energy without killing the planet.
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