Anyone interested in sustainability and ecology is in for a real treat tonight. We’re delighted to welcome to the Science Gallery distinguished zoologist and broadcaster, Professor Aubrey Manning, who’ll begin his lecture shortly. First, let me introduce you to our Master of Ceremonies for tonight, Duncan Stewart. Duncan is a TV presenter and award‑winning architect and a specialist in ecological design and energy. Duncan has presented many environmental series and in addition he is well known for his popular TV series, About the House. So, over to Duncan.
Thanks, Donna, and it’s great to have such a wide ranging audience here tonight. I know that we’ve got not just scientists here, even though this is Science Week and this is organised by Discover Science & Engineering, which part of Forfás. And, as you know, this is a very important week for science, and science is a very, very important subject for us as we go into the issues of climate change and the big challenges facing us.
And we’re very lucky tonight to have Professor Aubrey Manning, who’s talking about learning to live with our planet. And Professor Manning is one of Britain’s leading authorities on sustainability and ecology. He features on BBC television and natural radio and his main research and teaching interests are on animal behaviour, development and evolution. And he’s been involved in environmental issues since 1966, at the Centre of Human Ecology since its inception in the University of Edinburgh in 1970. He was Professor of Natural History at the University from 1973 until 1997. Professor Manning was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in Edinburgh in 1973 and received an OBE in 1998. He’s also President of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trust. So, we’re going to have a wonderful talk from Professor Aubrey Manning on learning to live with our planet. Thank you.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for having me. It’s a great privilege to kick off Science Week. I wanted to begin with Jacob Bronowski, because I think this, for me, is the moral of Science Week, that actually we want to see science as a part of culture. And I understand that you’re a bit worried in Ireland, as we certainly are in Britain, about what’s been called ‘the flight from science’, that young people think that science is unhuman in some way, not creative. It’s too hard, too rigid, full of facts and no feeling. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, the findings of science are hard facts, and if they’re good facts, they’ll hold up and they will explain how our world works. But during the process – the doing of science – scientists are involved in all the emotions as well as the intellect. Science, in practice, involves joy and sorrow, despair, and it’s truly creative. And when you’ve got some result that's come out really well and you understand something, it finally clicks, that must be the same feeling ‑ it is the same feeling ‑ as a poet who finally gets the last stanza of a poem into place. They’re not different.
OK. I have the pleasure to be involved in this International Year of Planet Earth, a United Nations venture with the International Union of Geological Sciences, and I’m happy and proud to be wearing the official tie, which was a present from the Chinese delegation when we launched IYPE in Paris at UNESCO. The logo is worth examining because this is the fiery mantle and core of the Earth. Here is the hydrosphere, the oceans. Here is the lithosphere on which we live and here is the atmosphere that also supports us. Now, the whole point of the IYPE is to bring out to the public ‑ there are a lot of research programmes going, and more of them later – but it is to bring out to the public some of the wonderful, brilliant, fascinating science which earth science has produced recently and in this way help us, I think, to see how science can help us towards a really sustainable mode of living. Through understanding the planet, we should be able to live with it better, learning to live with the Earth.
Now, I am absolutely delighted to be able to quote from the Archbishop of Dublin speaking yesterday, reported in today’s [Irish] Times. He said, ‘We need to start understanding the nature of the society we live in, the way it works and what’s wrong with it, and then we need to find the answer.’ Now, he’s using the word ‘society’ there, but I would substitute ‘world’. We need to understand the nature of the world we live in, the way it works and what’s wrong with it, and that’s what I hope to be talking a bit about today. Let me hasten to say I’m a zoologist; I’m not a geologist. There may be people here – in fact, I dearly suspect there are who know far more geology than I do – but I’m speaking as a generalist. I’m trying to look at the whole picture, because I believe that earth sciences and the biological sciences must go together, because life and the Earth have gone together.
And so, let’s go back to basics, as the Prime Minister of Britain once said. The Sun, our mother star. It’s a medium‑sized star about half‑way through its life, which is about 4.56 billion years. So, it’s going to burn for something over 4 billion years more and I suppose if we’re conservative we can say that it’s got about three billion years more useful life for us, looking at it from a purely selfish point of view. Beyond, the Sun will be dying and changing its nature and it will expand first to envelop the orbit of Mercury, by which time it will have burnt us up. But, still, if a week’s a long time in politics, surely 3 billion years is a reasonable time to aspire to? And one of the things I’m concerned about is that, actually, the human race, which I think is rather nice in moderation, should be able to continue – let’s say for the next 1,000 years, shall we? We’ll be quite modest. But, as you know, things are going wrong with it, as things are going wrong with society, as the Archbishop of Dublin said.
I love giving these statistics to students, because it does cut us down to size, I suppose you might say. The Sun compared to us is really enormously large. We are a small planet, but we’re very fortunately situated. Here is some artistic imagination of the four rocky planets. Here’s Mercury –I think the Sun should be much bigger than that because it’s much closer to the Sun than we are – burnt up on one side, frozen on the other. Here is Venus. We used to think it was a cold, wet planet, or at least a wet planet because its surface is always covered in clouds, but the clouds are of sulphuric acid vapour and the surface has gone runaway greenhouse effect, the surface temperature is about 450 degrees. Lead would be molten on the surface of Venus. Here is Mars. We’ll know a good deal more about this soon, I hope. It’s frozen out. It’s about ‑30. And no prizes for guessing where this is. It looks like the cover of a chocolate box, but what it shows – and this is the important thing – is that Earth has liquid water on the surface, and has had that for almost 4 billion years. It’s just the right size, Earth, just the right distance from the Sun. It is the Goldilocks planet – you remember Goldilocks trespassed into the three bears’ house and the first bowl of porridge she found was too hot – that’s Venus. The second was too cold – that’s Mars. But the third, the baby bear’s porridge, was just right.
So, [that's] the Earth forming, when the sun formed about 4.56 billion years ago, give or take a million here or there, and life began on Earth. There are traces, chemical traces of life on Earth very early in its history, maybe back as far as 4 billion, certainly 3.8, 3.9. Now, when the Earth was young, it was a violent place. I hope you’ve all looked at the Moon through a telescope or binoculars – a fabulous sight. We see the Earth and the Moon about the same age – I don’t have time to go into the ideas of how they formed, but the Earth must have been bombarded, just as the Moon has been bombarded incessantly by meteorites – the stuff in the solar system circulating around.
And if we look in detail at the surface of the Moon, we can see craters, and craters within craters, and craters within craters within craters – continuous bombardment. And, of course, on the Moon, there’s no atmosphere, there’s no wind, so they stay pristine. Only the light gravity of the Moon might cause some of these slopes to collapse occasionally.
Now, on Earth, we know there are traces of early meteor strikes, but most of them have been washed away or blown away over the millennia – not just millennia, I mean millions of billions of years. So, the early history of the Earth must have been very violent and, in fact, the oceans must have frequently been very hot and burnt – more of that in a minute.
Now, we know that the nature of the Earth is very dynamic. It’s the one of the planets in the solar system which is still actively shifting and moving its surfaces. If some space visitor from Andromeda came cruising through the solar system and took some photographs, or whatever way they record data on Andromeda, and then went off into other galaxies and 100 million years later came cruising back home and passed through the solar system again, taking more pictures, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus would look exactly the same. But the Earth wouldn’t look the same. And maybe the people from Andromeda would say, ‘Aha. Something’s going on down there’. Because the Earth is unique. It’s at the point of its life where it is still shifting and changing. And we know, of course, that the surface that we live on and think is of as so stable and permanent is, in fact, a series of plates and that these plates are moving around on the surface, sometimes sliding alongside one another, sometimes colliding, and mountains are thrown up and so on.
a. Alfred Wegener
All of this is terribly familiar to us now. It’s certainly taught in the early years of secondary school – maybe in primary school – but do remember, ladies and gentlemen, how recent all this knowledge is. When I was a student, which is not far back into the 17th century or so, I was taught that Alfred Wegener, this crazy Austrian had come up with this theory of continental drift, that the continents shifted around on the surface and that once upon a time South America and Africa had been joined. But, I was told, there’s no mechanism for this and we can’t explain the anomalies of the distribution of animals and plants on this theory. It’s crazy.
I wish Alfred Wegener ‑ whose body has never been found, he lies somewhere in the Greenland ice sheet – I wish he could have lived longer to see that yesterday’s heretics become tomorrow’s establishment. We should be looking for today’s heretics because maybe they have something to tell us – and perhaps I can think about some of the ideas they might have.
b. Marie Tharp
OK. All of that is so recent. Fifty, 60 years is all the time that we’ve known actually how the planet works. And this has meant that some of the people who made these pioneering observations are still alive – or certainly I can think of two or three who are still alive. And this was one whom I had the pleasure and the honour of interviewing for some television programmes. This is Marie Tharp. And at the time that this photograph was taken, she was about 84. She’s dead now. But talking to her was as if I, as a biologist, could have spoken to Darwin and said, ‘Tell me, Mr Darwin, what was it first gave you the idea that perhaps species were not constant?’ I could ask Marie Tharp about how she first discovered and measured that there is a mid‑ocean ridge running round the planet. And in the middle of this ridge, most crucially, there is a cleft, at which there is volcanic activity.
Now, she and her collaborator, Bruce Heezen, were taking these measurements from ships with simple asdic in 1960, about. They were employees of a big laboratory in the eastern states, the Lamont‑Doherty, whose director, Ewing, didn’t believe in continental drift. And, in fact, he tried to forbid his workers, his staff, from working on ideas of continental drift. But Marie Tharp made these measurements, and it takes a great deal of skill and immense labour. And she went to her collaborator, Bruce Heezen, and said, ‘Look. Down the middle of this ridge there is a cleft, and I think this may be active. There are faults coming out from it.’ And she told me that he said, ‘Oh no. That means continental drift, and we don’t believe in that.’ And her ideas were greeted with scorn and contempt – a heretic. But I was greatly privileged to meet this person.
So, it is all very recent and that’s why earth science – modern earth science – is such an exciting thing. We biologists have had our general theory for 150 years, but geologists for much less than that.
Now, back to craters again. The early Earth must have been a violent place, but that didn’t stop life getting going. We know now that there are three basic domains of living organisms. Two of them are familiar to us. Ourselves, up here, the complicated organisms – big ones, plants, fungi, animals and some protozoans and others. Then, the bacteria, which we have to live with, which live around us everywhere and in us. They are both bad and they’re good. We couldn’t live without them and we have trouble living with them sometimes.
But there is a third domain, much more recently studied. These are archaeans. Now, these are bacteria, archaebacteria they’re sometimes called, minute microscopic organisms. But they live in very different places. They live in the interstices of rocks, going down two, three kilometres. They live in the cracks in granite, the cracks in basalts. They live in oil wells and they live, for instance, in boiling pools in Iceland and also in the black smokers at Marie Tharp’s cleft on the mid‑ocean ridges. They can do that because their names suggest things. Thermoplasma, thermoproteus – both of those organisms can’t grow at temperatures below 60 degrees and can reproduce at 100 degrees. If the water boils, they’re still growing and reproducing. So in the early Earth, bacteria of this sort could keep going, even if the oceans boiled during this early time of Earth’s history.
Don’t bother about the text [in the slide: "Can deep bacteria live on nothing but rocks and water?"], answer the question. And the answer has to be ‘yes’, because when life first got going on the planet, there was no alternative. If you were an archaebacterium, you couldn’t go and have a nice comfortable life living in the gut of a mammal, because the mammals weren’t existing for another 3.5 billion years. All there was was chemicals – rock and water and the interactions, the hydrogen that was emitted by acid water acting on certain rocks.And these bacteria can build up complicated molecules from simple chemicals – a bit similar to the way that plants do.
Now, they’re still everywhere today. Don’t think that these as being the first form of life have now gone. They’re everywhere. And I am an arch‑conservationist. I’m really worried about the extinction and the threats to other living organisms. But I am consoled to know that there’s no need to have a Society for the Preservation of Archaeans. Nothing we do is going to affect them. They’re going to go on inhabiting the oil wells, the interstices of rocks, the rock pools until the Sun burns us up.
a. The planet affects life
Now, James Lovelock’s hypothesis links life and the Earth, as I want to do, and links it with this Gaia metaphor, hypothesis, model – whatever you like to call it. And you see that he makes it a dynamic duo. Earth supports life, life supports Earth. I would rather say ‘affects’ the Earth. And the way that life supports Earth – I beg your pardon, the way that the planet supports life is, of course, through providing all those – we call them ‘life resources’ – clean air, clean water, fertile soil, the life support systems which have been there for 4 billion years or more.
Now, these plate tectonics movements will illustrate to us a number of features of the way in which the activity of the planet, the life of the – I don’t want to call it ‘the life of the planet’ – the dynamism of the planet has affected the course of evolution. And in particular we can see one here, because notice how the planets [sic] are all together at certain times way back - 225 million years ago, Pangaea, a huge conglomerate of the continents, very much all together. Then they began to split apart and a rather critical splitting apart started occurring here. Here we are back 85 million years ago and here about 35 million years ago, and we can see Australia and South America are splitting off separately from the rest here. That had a big effect on the animal life, particularly the mammal life, that we see today. Because most, if we look around the whole of the main part of the world – OK? – Eurasia and the Americas - most of the mammals are… we call them eutherians. We would call them eutherians – perfect animals, that means – because we’re one of them and we couldn’t be less than perfect, could we? So these are the mammals which have long gestation periods and the young are born relatively advanced.
The alternative – or the others – are marsupials, who give birth to young – at a very, very early stage of development and they spend much more time in the pouch of the mother being, really growing up. They gestate, if you like, externally, in the mother’s pouch.
Now, for reasons which are not altogether clear, where eutherians and marsupials live together, for the most part the marsupials have lost out. They can’t compete so well. That’s what’s happened in all the rest of the world, and the marsupials have disappeared. They were there originally – we’ve got their fossils. But Australia was isolated early on and the marsupials have flourished there because no eutherian mammals had developed. And so the whole fascinating aspect of the zoology, the biology of Australia is dependent, is caused by the movements of the planet, grossly affecting evolution.
Here’s the present day. I hope all of you can see it. But I want to go back – I wish I had the picture – just 8 million years. There’s no Isthmus of Panama. That only formed about 3 million years ago, it became complete. That also affected evolution in a big way because animals which had evolved in isolation in South America were suddenly exposed to a whole lot of immigrants of a more vigorous type ‑ I don’t have deep time to go into details – and a lot of South American animals, unique to South America at that time became extinct. Again, the Earth, as it were, taking a big hand in evolution. I may say that the closing of that isthmus made a big difference to the world’s climate. It stopped warm water from circulating around easily between the Atlantic and the Pacific and that actually began to change the climate system and really set up the climate system that we have in the world today.
b. Life affects the planet
OK, that’s one direction. The planet supports life. But I also mentioned the other half of Lovelock’s metaphor – life affects the planet. I don’t know whether there’s any chalk in Ireland – some of you geologists may be able to tell me. There is masses of chalk in Britain, and we’re very fond of it. I mean, the White Cliffs of Dover of course swing across and there’s the huge chalk of the Pas de Calais in France, which runs through and comes out actually, it’s covered, it comes out in the Crimea. There is a vast amount of chalk. All of it is formed from the skeletons of minute plants and animals living in warm seas, which build calcium carbonate skeletons. These, when they die, these go down to the bottom, become compressed, modified chemically and form chalk. They also form limestone as well. Huge amounts of the Earth’s crust is chalk and limestone. It wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for life. So this is a really big effect that life has had on the structure of our Earth.
One other statistic I can’t resist giving you. If we look at this chalk – this is Dorset and that’s Swanage over there, I don’t know if any of you know the south of England – the giant, the absolute giant amongst the tiny organisms whose skeletons make up this chalk is 2 mm in diameter. How many of them in the chalk? Quite a lot. Life has affected the Earth very greatly.
Here’s another way that life affects the Earth. The huge Boreal forest of Canada here. This is a map drawn by the Natural Resources Canada and it doesn’t, of course, include the Boreal forest which goes right across the north of Europe and Siberia and comes round the other side, and it certainly doesn’t stop at the Alaskan border here. That forest is made up of unbelievable numbers of coniferous trees – there’s some deciduous towards the south, you can see it indicated here. And here is tundra, beyond the treeline. Now, the nature of that forest – this is what it looks like – and there are vast deposits of peat here. This is a gigantic carbon sink. It’s fixing carbon and - because it’s a wet, cold climate - storing it as peat. It’s the best kind of thing that we could possibly have at the moment when we are worried about rising carbon dioxide. Needless to say, in some parts of its range, particularly in Russia, the chainsaws are out in a big way. Well, there’s an awful lot of trees to cut down, but we would be wise to recognise what the forest does for us and how it affects the planet. It’s affecting us as well.
a. The extinction of the dinosaurs
OK, now back to life and the evolution of life. The planet has supported life, but not always easily. Here is modern life ‑ 600 million years ago, a mere snap of the fingers. This is when the big organisms, the big plants, the big animals got going. It’s where we’ve got really good fossils. It goes back a little further than this, but never mind. 600 million when we’re starting records here and we’re going up to the present. And this is a measure of the diversity. We often talk about biodiversity – this is a measure of how diverse life is, and we see that it grows. And there are checks and there are checks – not a good period here. A huge check here. In fact, it’s believed that maybe as much as 95% of all living things became extinct at this point here, about 280 million years ago, the Permo‑Trias. But life recovered. And then there was a further extinction a mere 65 million years ago at the boundary between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary. And every primary school child knows about that extinction, because of course then we lost the glorious dinosaurs. We lost a whole lot of other things as well, but it’s the dinosaurs we really lost. And life, though, recovered. Once the big reptiles had gone, the mammals could get going, and the mammals have really gone and taken off.
Now, what went wrong? If the planet is supporting life, what went wrong at these times? What could have gone wrong to produce this colossal extinction here? What could have gone wrong to extinguish the dinosaurs? Fire. Volcanic activity, we know, on a colossal scale. I mean, the kind of volcanic activity that Mount St Helens would be just an indoor firework. That has gone on in the past and we can see its result. We can see gigantic fields of volcanic ash covering vast areas in Siberia, covering huge areas in south‑western India. Putting enormous amounts of ash and carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, making the oceans acid, all of that would have been hard for life.
Ice. We know it’s affected us in the Northern Hemisphere very greatly over the past 30 million years or so. That might have been involved. And, of course, meteorite strikes, beloved of science-fiction writers. Well, we know that there was a big meteor strike about 65 million years ago when the big mass extinction that I’ve referred to occurred. But there are real biological and geological problems in exactly interpreting this. I mean, what went on?
You may have seen the BBC programme Walking with Dinosaurs. I mean, computer graphics really coming into its own. And there, in the last programme – I think it was the last programme – is the mother tyrannosaurus rex, you know, who is looking after her babies, who are running around. I must say, it was not a picture that really convinced me as a zoologist, but never mind, it was very attractive. And then, of course, there’s a light in the sky and the light gets bigger and bigger, the screen grows white – pfsst, they’re gone.
But, you see, it wasn’t quite like that. We know that there are fossils of some dinosaurs for at least 1 million years after – 1 million years. So flash extinctions we don’t have. I mean, you must recognise that the scale of that mass extinction diagram is enormous. I mean, a minute amount is 1 million years. It’s extremely difficult for geologists to pin this down and also for biologists to understand why some animals survived and others didn’t. All the ammonites in the ocean, all the ichthyosaurs in the ocean went out. But a lot of fish survived. All the big reptiles went out, but the relatives of the crocodile survived. What was going on?
Now, good science – this is one thing that I’m sure will come out in this week – good science comes not from knowing things, but from not knowing things. The stimulus for good science is problems and long may these problems continue in some ways. I mean, there are some problems we want to solve, but there are other problems we want to worry away at till we really reach what we think is a really good theory. And that’s going on hard at the moment, when biologists and geologists, working together in a kind of partnership, are trying to understand what happened at these mass extinctions.
I mentioned that after the last mass extinction here 65 million years ago, the mammals took off. So, we count these – one, two, three, four, five. Now, there is a sixth mass extinction occurring. It’s taking place as we speak, and we don’t have much problem in understanding why that one is on.
Here is our species, homo sapiens, colonising the globe. About 200,000 [years ago], maybe it’s been going back even a little further now – the emergence in Africa, moving out across the world, with these as the rough dates. Some of them have been pushed back a bit now, but notice that humans got – homo sapiens got to Australia 10,000 years before it got to Europe. It was easier to go east and do some island hopping than to get up here. Maybe it was very cold part at that time. And then getting across the new world – and the dates here are quite wrong. I’m sure it’s earlier than that that humans got to the new world. There’s a lot of new work in archaeology and paleoarchaeology going on there.
Now, remember, this is just homo sapiens, because other species of homo had got out of Africa long before this. Homo erectus, for instance, had got out of, and was in Georgia here about 1.8 million years ago, and got to Peking – Peking Man down here and Java Man here much earlier. And we know, we’ve got remains of homo relatives in East Anglia from 850,000 years ago – but that’s homo heidelbergensis, the common ancestor of Neanderthals and ourselves. Here, we’re just speaking of homo sapiens and we’re the only ones here. But as little as 50,000 years ago, there may have been four species of homo co‑existing on the planet. I say co‑existing – I don’t think they met one another much. They may have done, that’s a wonderful, tantalising issue. But, anyway, we’re alone now.
a. Land forming and disappearing
The sixth mass extinction. And this is where one of those things that’s going wrong that the Archbishop and I agree on. And I want to talk a bit about this in the second part here. Now, here’s International Year of Planet Earth and here are the 10 themes around which the research and the outreach, the publicity is going to be organised. I don’t have possibly time or competence to deal with all of them, but I’m going to deal with one or two of these issues. And let’s, first of all, deal with hazards that we have to accept. Living on this planet, we just have to accept that the planet works in particular ways and sometimes there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Now, sometimes this doesn’t matter. Here is the planet being worked. It’s an interaction between life and the planet. These mountains, which I think are on the west coast of Soviet Central Asia –Russian Central Asia – on the Pacific coast, not Central Asia at all, I’m sorry. Here is a great – mountains are being worn down by water and land. A huge delta here, an alluvial fan is building up. This is a process which has gone on ever since the Earth’s crust existed. And it will continue to go on, and there’s nothing we can do about it – and maybe it doesn’t matter very much. It depends.
Similarly, here’s the reverse process, if you like. This is the land actually crumbling away before the sea. This is on the east coast of Britain, a chalk cliff. Extraordinary. There’s a huge amount of iron in the early time that this was deposited, making this wonderful red colour. But here’s a great chunk of the cliff which has fallen off. In 10 years’ time, you won’t even know that was there. It’ll have all washed away. And there are bits of the east coast of Britain where, as you walk along the shore, you can see not what fell a year ago, what fell that morning. It’s really eroding fast.
And, again, well, we can live with it. It’s OK, so long as you don’t own a house, which is just up there. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can buy a house in parts of Norfolk for 10p, which would be €12, something like that. But it won’t last you very long. We have to accept that.
b. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes
But there are other hazards that we have more difficulty with. I mentioned gigantic volcanic eruptions in the past. They are going to happen again. We know that it’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when.
And here is a pretty major one, in the Philippines, 10 or 15 years ago, which was enormous. It killed a lot of people and it cooled the climate by about half a degree centigrade for about two years afterwards, because of the amount of sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide and ash which was put into the atmosphere, affecting the ozone layer. It was an extraordinary effect. A relatively minor explosion – at least it is minor if you don’t live in the Philippines. But it’s very terrifying.
Similarly, Popocatépetl, a magnificent 17,000‑foot volcano near Mexico in Mexico, near Mexico City. It’s going to blow its top. A sister volcano – it would be about here on this slide – did so about 100,000 years ago and covered a vast area in a metre or two metres of ash. Popocatepétl will do the same. Very difficult – there are probably 50 million people living within 100 kilometres of Popocatépetl.
We have to accept this. We have to accept earthquakes – they’re the other side, if you like, of volcanic activity. This is a plate shifting, and as the plate shifts volcanic activity may be initiated. Well, the Anatolian faults running through northern Turkey have had many earthquakes recently – a bad one in 1999. Istanbul is certainly on a danger line.
We’re getting better, earth science is getting better at predicting earthquakes, but it’s still not very good. But we know there will be major earthquakes. We just have to accept that – that’s part of living on Planet Earth. Nothing we can do about it in a physical sense – is there anything we can do about it in a social sense? Not very easy, but still we should be thinking about it.
a. Ground water and soil
Now, two other themes of International Year of Planet Earth – ground water and soils. Now, here are problems which are largely human generated – we can do something about these. This is one of the things that’s going wrong. And I can’t resist giving you this illustration. The Aral Sea – or it was the Aral Sea – back in the late 1960s, this would be.
Krushchev wanted to irrigate for growing cotton in Soviet Central Asia, Pakistan and the areas round there. There was the Aral Sea, so the Soviet Union went into a five‑year plan to develop this. No biological advice taken at all ‑ they just got going on it. They’re pumping the Aral Sea’s water into the cotton fields. The Aral Sea is an island drainage area. It couldn’t keep up and began drying out. There was a big fishing industry in the Aral Sea and they were becoming desperate because they were running out of sea. And so, at the last moment, they tried to dig a trench so that they could sail out into one of the feeder rivers, but they left it a bit late. And so we had this extraordinary sight of big trawlers just lying there in the middle of what’s a desert now. And furthermore, a very dangerous desert, because during the cotton‑growing period they pumped gigantic, thoughtless quantities of herbicide and pesticide. The dust is now blowing around, and it’s pretty lethal stuff. And so, although some other bits of the Aral Sea are now recovering, because of course I don’t think a thread of cotton came out of this area, the Aral Sea will slowly recover. But it’s very difficult to get rid of these persistent chemicals. This is human folly, due to biological ignorance and the general feeling of human arrogance. There is not enough humility in our species about the way we are living on the planet.
Here’s another way. Clear the forests, burn them. That’s the result. And you grow soya beans or, if it’s in Southeast Asia, you grow palm oil. And you use this for making any kinds, masses of our food, feeding it to animals and it’s all part of our western way of life. Some of it makes biodiesel and in doing so, of course, probably consumes more energy than the biodiesel will generate. It destroys habitat, it destroys soils, and it generally is an ecological disaster. The British Government, trying to be green, decreed that from, I think, it was earlier this year, 5% of all fuel sold in Britain should be biodiesel, should be of biological origin. They’re frantically trying to back‑pedal now.
Nobody asked biologists. Nobody did the thinking through. It seemed economically sensible. It seemed like a good green idea. It would indicate that we’re doing something about climate change. Ignorance.
b. Climate
Climate – at least we all, or the great majority of people accept that climate is going to be a problem. I call it ‘a tap on the shoulder’. It may be becoming a kick on the shins. Wait a minute. You can’t go on like this.
I put this slide up because it’s really a tribute to Charles Keeling who, back in the 1950s, thought it might be a good idea to see what’s happening to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There’s been a lot of burning of fossil fuel already, because the industrial revolution, after all, was a century before this. So he picked an area where the air was really clean – as clean as it could be – on the top of an extinct volcano in Hawaii, and began measuring systematically, year by year. And it’s been kept up. Well – no surprises in the trend of the line. But, look, isn’t that interesting? It’s a zigzag, because of course most carbon fixation goes on in the Northern Hemisphere. That’s where most of the plants are – all that great swathe of arboreal forest, all the huge rich cold oceans, which are better for plankton than the warm oceans because they’ve got more oxygen in. That’s where the photosynthesis goes on. So in the northern summer, a lot of carbon gets fixed and goes down; in the northern winter, it goes up again.
It’s gone on for a very long time. This is records back nearly half a million years, and it’s temperature in blue and it’s – I think it’s temperature in blue. Yes, that’s right. And the green is carbon dioxide. And what you can see here brilliantly is what makes the climate deniers, who will say, ‘Oh, but cycles like this have always happened during the ice ages and it’s got warmer again. And that’s all been before any human activity.’ But, look, it’s this graph here. Carbon dioxide is rising now at a rate which is unparalleled for, in fact we know, 30 million years. So the rate of rise is absolutely gigantic. And we know, and I think there is no other explanation but that this is human activity – the burning of fossil fuels – we don’t have to look very far.
Now, I think we should operate the precautionary principle. If you think it may be going to rain, you take an umbrella out with you. This is Wally Brooker, who knows a great deal about climate and paleoclimate, suggesting that we are cautious. He worked out the conveyor belt whereby a great deal of warmth from the equatorial regions is transferred by the conveyor belt on the surface of the Atlantic up to Western Europe. Therefore, Ireland, which is on the same latitude as Labrador, has a warm west coast, whereas, on Labrador, the sea is frozen for four months of the year. This conveyor belt has broken in the past when too much water – fresh water – has emerged onto the surface from the Greenland and Arctic. That’s happening at the moment. And so global warming may mean something other than being just getting warmer. Sorry.
What global warming will… there are many uncertainties. It’s an enormously complicated subject. Climatologists have got some of the biggest computational power on earth, but it’s still very, very difficult. The one certainty, it seems to me as an outsider, is that there are going to be more violent events. There’s more energy in the system and though some places are going to get hotter, some will get colder, some will get wetter, some will get drier. There’ll be more storms. You’ll have six tornados in the Gulf of Mexico in a month instead of one in a month. Plenty of signs of that sort of thing happening.
And for me, and for many people in Britain, this is an iconic image now. That’s a cliché, but it means something. The frightening thing, the rather poignant thing is that it’s actually very beautiful, isn’t it? This is Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire, completely surrounded by the worst floods that we’ve had in the south of England for living memory. And that is part of the violence of climate. The abbey survives. Tewkesbury – well, you can move along the roads now. But this image will remain, I think, with many of us. You may have equivalent ones.
Now, I’m going to change tack here a little bit because I want to talk a little bit about, in concluding, attitudes. This is a graph – I’m not going to, we’re not able here to quote accurate figures. There’s no possible means of getting accurate measurements here. But, look, what this basically is is an attempt to look at how much of the Earth’s life support systems and resources is being used up by human beings at different stages in recent history. They’re going through economic figures, GDP, consumption of fossil fuels, consumption of water per head and so on.
And, I don’t want to argue about at what point we’re dealing with here, but, look, there’s only one Earth. OK? That’s what we have to deal with. That’s the one certain figure on here. And on any reasonable approximation, we’re probably using per year more than one Earth's work of a year’s replacement. I don’t mind whether you say it was in 1975 or whether you think that it won’t happen until further on in the century. It’s rising. Our demands on the planet are rising and at some point the planet won’t be able to replace the life support systems each year to make up for a year’s use.
What’s interesting is that this assumption, this figure here, was made on the assumption that we – that’s homo sapiens – would be prepared to leave 12% of the Earth's resources for other living organisms – I don’t count our domestic animals or our domestic crops – that’s for us. No, we’re leaving 12% ‑ one‑eighth – for everything else. Now, you may not think that’s an over‑generous portion, but if you allow, if we don’t use that then we go on for a little bit longer, but we will, by implication, have made life very difficult for everything else.
Now probably many of you have see Al Gore’s film. It’s very good, I think. I remember being a bit resistant to seeing it. I thought, ‘Oh goodness, I’ve heard so much about it. I can’t, you know, ‘I don’t want any more bad news.’ But I thought it was a good film and I learnt quite a bit from it. But there are other inconvenient truths and the way we get round this is by denial. Let me quote again today’s Irish Times, which was – this is the point, of course. We are getting more information now. Every day we can see something. This is Dick Ahlstrom, the science editor of the Times writing: ‘Climate concern having little impact on behaviour’. This is you he’s talking about. ‘A majority of people express concern about the environment and climate change, but few are willing to do anything to counter global warming.’ What this really means is that we can have the Mayor of Dublin, as she was yesterday, I think, lighting up energy‑conserving lights on the Christmas tree. That’s great. But are we going to say that maybe cheap flying is out and that maybe we ought not to take a car for anything less than a five‑mile journey and so on? No, we’re not. Not yet. We still are in denial. We still think that the Earth is going to provide.
Now, this is just one aspect of the Earth, which I think is probably the most significant piece of news for any day. And it’s every day, ladies and gentlemen. We are walking up a down escalator and I think we’re beginning to get out of breath, as one does on such a venture.
I won’t go any further into this. I simply will say that I think the first stage of getting back into some sort of balance, getting some sort of human ecology, is to recognise that this is a desperate figure. That’s the first stage – and we aren’t even there yet, because we’re still in denial.
Now, I’m a great admirer of Aldo Leopold, and he really is writing a kind of cry of distress from biologists who are worried about the natural world. 'One lives alone in a world of wounds' – I absolutely agree with him. I mean, alone, there are plenty of biologists – we’re not alone. I don’t feel alone, but I know we’re still a minute minority.
I don’t agree with this: 'make-believe that the consequences of sciences are none of his business'. They’re not the consequences of science at all. Science and technology make it easier for us to live and to destroy the world. They will put a chainsaw in the hand of somebody who can cut down a giant in the tropical rainforest in half an hour, whereas it would have taken six weeks to cut it down by hand. They can do that. But that’s nothing to do with science itself. Science is not a problem. It’s information which has infinite opportunity for us. But, at any rate, we are alone, some of us, in a world of wounds.
Now, this picture, The Guardian newspaper in Britain has taken to having a double‑page photograph in every issue. Many of them, I think, are a waste of newsprint, but this one struck me. I was horrified by it. Now, why horrified? Because orangutans are an endangered species. Here we see a whole lot of healthy orangutans enjoying some lychees. But any biologist will know that this is a world of wounds. Orangutans are solitary animals. They live... each has a large territory in the canopy of tropical rainforest. They never meet, except briefly for mating, and the mother rears her young with her for perhaps three, four years until it can go out and set up on its own. They never, ever assemble like this. This is totally unnatural. It’s a result of the destruction of rainforest, very often to produce palm oil for our toothpaste and our cooking, our soap, our biodiesel. It’s a tragic scene.
Well, the 10 themes again, and they indicate axes along which good science can bring us back. Now, I mentioned the launching at UNESCO in Paris and the encouraging thing there was that there were scientists from, I think at that point, 72 nations, come together to discuss the themes here and how they could collaborate and get the message across. Here’s where they are – the purple areas. One of the first countries to develop an international committee in operation was Iraq. Brave people in Iraq putting their head above the parapet and saying, ‘Look, there’s some science to be dealt with here’. Now, in many parts of Iraq, you don’t put your head above the parapet and start thinking that there are other things more important than whether you’re a Shia or a Sunni or whether the Americans are occupying you or not. They’re interested in long‑term problems.
I was a chairman of one of the sessions there and we had a tight schedule. And as I was beginning the afternoon, chairing, a chap came up to me and said, ‘I would like two minutes to speak and I would like to come up onto the platform’. And I thought, ‘Oh, come on. I don’t want this. I’ve too tight a schedule.’ This guy was from Iran, a part of Bush’s axis of evil – OK? What he wanted to speak about was not the destruction of Israel; it was about the way in which Iranian methods for harnessing and protecting ground water might be adapted for other areas in the Middle East. He was a geologist. He did only speak for two minutes and I thought, ‘This is what it’s about’. Science has a common language for all cultures – it’s culture free – and at its best it offers us an opportunity to explore the real problems that are facing us – what’s going wrong – and to get away from the awful short‑term things which occupy us. We can’t ignore the short‑term things, of course not. We’re living in human societies. We have to begin from where people are. But we have to recognise that there’s another stage above this and I think science can contribute here very greatly.
a. The black‑throated diver
Now, I always like quoting Socrates – well, maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t. Plato ascribed this to him. We are going to need wisdom if we are going to get through this and therefore we need love. We need to love the natural world. And I give you just a few examples. You, I hope, all have the same examples and I hope that you will help, be energised through science and Science Week to help all our young people to find something in the natural world which catches them and moves them.
Now, this bird, the black‑throated diver, moves me. I don’t know quite why. It’s a strange bird. It lives in remote lochs in the northwest of Scotland. It probably lives in Northern Ireland as well – the northern part, the western part of the island. I don’t know. It’s a strange bird. It lives in areas where it’s very difficult to get a living. It usually can only breed once every two years because the female can’t build up enough food reserves to lay eggs every year. It’s a shy bird. It doesn’t like any interference. What it needs from us is absence. It needs nothing from us at all. It’s leading its own life on the planet. And I find this inspiring. And I hope all of you will have similar examples. It’s simply, as Thoreau said in Walden, it marches to the beat of a different drum. And that is what we are in danger of losing. Let us cling on, each of us, to our own favourite.
b. Durdle Door
Now, look, another, a place in the natural world that I live. It’s the Durdle Door on the south coast of England in Dorset. It’s a limestone – it’s covered by chalk. But the chalk’s eroded away and it’s been tilted up ‑ the limestone underneath it. This is Jurassic limestone. It’s been tilted up, because when Africa hit Europe, it pushed and the ripple is going through. And you can see the contorted rocks here. And these horizontal strata were tipped up vertically.
So here is life, abundant life living now. Here is the Durdle Door and through the Durdle Door – you can’t see it in this picture – there are holes and circular parts, which are the roots of a Jurassic forest, with great lycopods growing back 200 million years ago. So, for me, this symbolises life and the Earth interlocked together. It’s also a place I love.
I have to leave you with that picture. That’s the only picture to leave you with, really, isn’t it? Because there is, as René Dubos and his collaborator Margaret – goodness, I can’t remember her name now, never mind. In 1972, they published a book, Only One Earth. That’s right – there is only one Earth. And the rest of the solar system is basically well represented by this – that’s the surface of the Moon. Not too much use to us. And so we have to look after our home, and I hope that from love comes concern and therefore we start to put it right. And science is one of the ways that’s going to help us to do that.
Now, I’m particularly fond of one of your great Irish politicians of the 18th century. But let me also mention to you before I quote his words of wisdom that the Geological Survey of Ireland has been organising a whole series of geological events throughout Ireland during this international year, and it will go on. There’s a website. You can get onto it and you can see what is going on in the way of outreach to get the people of Ireland to recognise the wonderful land that you inhabit – fantastic mixed geology in which you can see rocks of great ancients and you can see the work of the ice which only left here 12,000 years ago. You can see it all there. And if we can get our young people to understand this and to enjoy the science that interprets this, then we have much more hope – much more hope.
And that’s really it. There’s everything to play for. And science, we’re going to need all the good technology that we can get. But it’s going to be technology which is based around an understanding of what we’re aiming for, an understanding of the constraints.
And here are texts from Edmund Burke, which I will leave you with. The first is surely an inspiration to all of us and a consolation when you feel, ‘Oh my goodness, everything is going wrong. The world is going to hell in a handcart and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ But, yes, there is. And many people internationally are combining on this now.
And here’s a message for all of our politicians, but of course we elect politicians and so that’s the message for us as well. Thank you very much.
Duncan Stewart
Obviously, we are facing incredible challenges and you have kind of touched on some of these huge challenges facing the planet and obviously these are now on our doorstep and happening very fast. How do we deal with this issue? Before I open it to discussion to the audience, because we’re now going to have a good discussion, first of all, questions – questions and answers – but dialogue here for the next half hour. And I’m hoping we’re going to get some good comments. But how do we deal with this challenge? Because science, if you like, we know what’s going wrong. We know how serious the issues are. And yet we look at our politicians, we look at our economists, we look at our religions – all of these have, if you like, exposed us to denial. And we are in a state of denial on this planet. And we are facing, with all of this knowledge and all of this science, we seem to be facing into a disaster. How do we deal with this and how does science take the role that should be leading us through these challenges that we face?
Aubrey Manning
Well, as I was saying at the end, my inclination is that there is not enough general knowledge about the sheer facts of how we live – our position on the planet, really, that we are living on capital and not on income. This is really it. And I think that the great majority of our fellow citizens don’t accept that. We do believe that the h is limitless.
One of the ways forward, I believe, is through better knowledge and coming to love the Earth. I mean, any... to get some of this concern. I mean, I don’t want everybody to go around thinking about the world of wounds, because the world is still a very beautiful place and, in a way, nature is very forgiving. If we give it space, it can recover. The Aral Sea is beginning to fill up again.
But I think you hit upon it, Duncan. We do need much more the voice of science in society. The trouble is that we are ruled in general by people who have an economics background. And I hope that this financial turmoil which is operating in the world at the moment may have some good results. I feel, as an outsider ‑ to the world of finance, that is – it indicates that they’ve been living on unreal expectations. They’ve been living on denial that growth can be perpetual, and I think any scientist, certainly any biologist, could tell you that perpetual growth is impossible. The only thing that can go on growing for ever is ideas, and we’re not short of those. And the way forward is through, I think, an enhanced status for science, really. We should be pushing hard for better science and always pushing up against the naïve political views, which we’ve had now.
Now, it’s no good knocking politicians, as I said, because we do vote them in, don’t we? But surely there must now, I think there must now be a pause. We have had probably a bit more than a tap on the shoulder – I would have thought a good nudge or a kick on the shins – yes? – that something is going wrong. I don’t want to end, don’t want to put a depressing note, but it is depressing. In Britain, you see, the price of oil went up to $140 a barrel or something. It’s now down to $65 a barrel. So the price at the pump, which is what all the media go for – what does this mean for the price at the pump? The price at the pump has come down again and people are thinking, ‘Right, you know, the Earth’s providing again. We’re back to normal.’
It’s very understandable. I mean, I share it. I go into the garage and I fill up and I say I’m jolly glad. You know, I’m saving £4 on this tankful. I don’t want to appear in any way superior or arrogant. It’s no way forward. We have to understand where people are coming from. But surely the precautionary principle would suggest that if we’re being sensible we really ought to take stock and prepare for what’s to come.
I mean, you’ve been doing a lot of work on energy conservation yourself and trying to get some sense into the construction industry. It’s not an easy task, I imagine, because it’s always price. But, in the end, it’s going to be more expensive, isn’t it, if we don’t?
Duncan Stewart
Well, I think there’s only one solution with our buildings and that is to make them such that we have the technology, we have the knowledge and when we are building, there’s only one way to build and that’s passive buildings that have no demand for energy. And we can do this. And we can do this with our electricity through renewables. But we need to conserve in the future. We need to change our transport. There’s big challenges facing us.
Aubrey Manning
Yes. Transport is one of the big things. It really is. Well, what do you feel? It’s very – which would be your first point of attention were you – I won’t say Barack Obama, he’s got other things to deal with – but the Taoiseach?
Duncan Stewart
Who’s going to open the questions?
Question
Yes. Not really a question, it’s more a point that I was taking when you were speaking, that you said. I think it comes down to the community, that we as scientists, we have a responsibility to teach people in that community. I mean, I think any scientists in the room – and I’m assuming most people are – it’s easier for us to have community in science and understand it and to love it. And I think that we have such a strong responsibility to pass that on and I think that’s a large part of the problem, that so many people are ignorant about science. And I think that the way science is educated – certainly in the secondary schools and certainly at third level – we’re not really taught that. We’re taught that we’re scientists, we love scientists, and we’re this sort of close‑knit community when we get it. But we’re not spreading that and I think that’s what needs to change. We have to be given that ability to pass it on and to let other people understand that ability.
Duncan Stewart
How many scientists in the room here, by the way? Yes? How many? Most people non‑scientists. Yes. Well, for those that are scientists, do you believe that, you know, we are giving enough cognisance to science in Ireland? You know, are we treating science seriously enough? Do we give it its presence? I mean, are you outnumbered by economists? I think the Professor here mentioned, you know, the influence of politicians and economists. We’re incredibly influenced by these. But is science given its place?
Question
Certainly at the more entry‑level science jobs, I know in Ireland, anyway, that it would be an easier decision to say I’m going to study accountancy or I’m going to study finance, because the chances are I’ll make a much bigger salary in the long run. But to go into science, I know that you can end up with a very highly esteemed job and be very respected in your field, but as I was saying, at those lower levels, you never get that. But I think the point I really wanted to make at the start was that when we’re taught science and when we go on to study science at third level, we’re not given that, the ability to pass it on to other people. As an accountant or an economist, you know that you are going to have to go and spread that at some other point. Whereas a scientist, as I say, we’re just a small close‑knit community and I don’t feel we pass it on.
Aubrey Manning
A comment I would make is that, I mean, I very largely agree with you, but I am encouraged by how many of my students in Edinburgh – particularly, I’m no biologist, of course – how many of them are very interested and anxious to put across their science to the public. Quite a few of them want to go into jobs in the media and into writing, and in fact we’re very proud that two or three prestigious popular journals in science are being edited by Edinburgh graduates now. So there is a move that way. But you’re completely right. The idea that scientists are separate from the rest of the community, because what I feel is I don’t want to think just about scientists being better at communicating – that’s got to come – I want ordinary – well, that’s a derogatory term – I want other people to understand science as a part of culture.
C P Snow’s 'two cultures', you know, that was 50 years ago or more. There’s still a bit of that. It’s possible for people, educated people, to say glibly, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about science. It was never for me. I don’t understand anything about it at all.’ And they can be regarded as educated people. But if they said, ‘Oh, I never heard of William Yeats. Shakespeare – who’s that?’ You couldn’t say that, could you? No. Because that’s culture, whereas science is not culture – and that’s where we’re going wrong. Science is culture.
Duncan Stewart
Where do you take the subject of creationism and – what is the new word for it? – intelligent design?
Aubrey Manning
Intelligent design.
Duncan Stewart
Yes. How do you treat those sorts of topics or the big climate change deniers?
Aubrey Manning
The climate change deniers do not worry me so much because I think, actually, the facts are mounting so fast now that they are scrabbling for what few crumbs, molecules of comfort they can gather and I think they’re much less vocal now. Creationism frightens me a bit, because we know its influence in the States and it’s commoner here than one would think. It’s coming, you know, from the world of academe. You think, ‘Oh, you can forget that’, but you can’t. It’s always out there.
I don’t know. You have to start where people are coming from and you must teach real, good biology, real evolution as a branch of science, which it is. It’s evidence based. It requires hypotheses which can be refuted by other evidence and so on. And we have to teach that as part of science. But you have, I think, to say, ‘Well, look, I hear where you’re coming from, but you do realise that what you are saying now is not science. And the reason I know it’s not science is there’s no way in which you could be disproved, is there? So, you’re trying to interpret the world in a different way from me. But the way you’re interpreting the world is all very well, but the way that I’m interpreting the world is actually standing the test much better. I mean, the way I’m interpreting the world’ – and I’m thinking here of rational science, evolution, the laws of physics and so on – ‘the way I’m interpreting the world is what you really believe most of the time, isn’t it? Because when you get into an airplane, you expect the laws of lift and thrust and gravity to be operating, don’t you? You don’t have some vague belief that something else may be operating, which you don’t know about and you can’t prove. No. You rely on a scientific explanation of the world to keep you in the air.’
I think I’d begin to go at it this way. I think you have to, however difficult it may be, one has to – I don’t want to use the word ‘respect’ because I don’t respect it, but I tolerate it if I know where it’s coming from. I mean, most people who are creationists have been brought up that way as young children. I mean, the sad thing is that you do tend to go the way your parents have brought you up, haven’t they? I mean, I remember so well. I mean, I was brought up a rather strict Baptist and, as a little boy, I believed all that – I really did – and sincerely and deeply. And I suppose it enriched my life. I don’t want to be – what worries me is if it’s being used as a substitute for science. I mean, I wouldn’t mind, I suppose, intelligent design being mentioned in social or religious affairs studies in schools. I mean, it is a phenomenon which you have to deal with it. But to teach it in a science lesson is a contradiction in terms. Sorry. Does that – madam?
Question
I think you are preaching to the converted somewhat in this audience. The very nature that you’re giving the talk, people are coming because maybe they’ve heard of you or they’re interested in the subject. The big issue is really trying to get people who aren’t interested in it interested. And I think that kind of starts really at nursery school and parents have some role to play, but if they’re not interested themselves then you’ve got to give someone else the chance to do that. But you can do simple things like taking kids out and showing them what the trees are like, what’s in the trees, how do they grow, where do they start. There’s so many things that can be started at a very young age, and I think that’s hugely important because unless you love the planet, as you were saying there, there’s no hope for the planet at all. And I suspect everybody here probably has an interest in the natural world, the geological world and whatever. So we have to get the message out to other people to give them that sense of joy and wonder and delight in the world that surrounds us. And that’s why I think programmes like you’ve been involved in and David Attenborough’s been involved in, many of those BBC programmes, are terrific, because they do give people the opportunity to see beyond their own garden. But then they can translate that into their own local environment and see what is beautiful just on their doorstep.
Aubrey Manning
Yes.
Question
And there was something else I wanted to say in connection with economics. This latest economic crisis we have, what’s happening now is they’re talking about giving tax cuts so we can all go out and spend more, so we can all consume more. So there seems to be, they’re polar opposites, the idea of trying to conserve things and appreciate what you have and trying to keep the economy going, keeping people in jobs. And how do we find a way around that?
Duncan Stewart
Yes. I mean, the economic downturn globally at the moment, is there an opportunity now in the western world, in our countries, to avail of this? I think you touched on it, Professor, there. But should we now be taking, if you like, advantage of the situation to try and readjust and be more sustainable? Because, you know, you mentioned economic development cannot just keep growing the way it’s growing. I mean, how do you deal with these sorts of subjects?
Aubrey Manning
Well, I’m naïve in this regard ‑ you will understand that already, I’m sure – but my feelings are that there is a huge amount of economic activity and opportunity to be generated in retracing our steps. Because, if we’re going to move – suppose we set our sights on moving to a carbon‑conservative economy, that’s going to involve a whole series of really big changes and a lot of economic effort. One’s going to switch from making cars to keeping cars going and one’s going to switch from resource‑profligate industries to resource‑conservative industries. Now, a whole lot of these things are happening – it’s not all bad news, is it? But there is a real opportunity here and, I mean, in its limited way I think our Gordon Brown has been saying that he’s going to try to launch initiatives to increase insulation in housing. I mean, it’s retrofit, of course, which is always more difficult, but there are ways in which one can make houses much more energy conservative, and this can generate a lot of activity. There are very sophisticated ways – well, I’m speaking to the expert here, sir ‑ you know there are very sophisticated ways of making places carbon neutral. There’s huge opportunities in various types of renewables. A lot of money’s gone into wind power – I’m sure it has in Ireland. I saw, I think, driving in from the airport a big wind farm and so on. That’s off‑the‑shelf technology, really, but there are other sorts of technology involving harnessing sea power. Well, it’s going in Strangford Lough, I think, in the North. Maybe here too, I don’t know.
Duncan Stewart
Tidal.
Aubrey Manning
Tidal energy – much more reliable than wind. You’ve got it twice a day and, of course, the turbines work in both directions. So you have four cycles a day going. There’s all of that and, linked to that, I was impressed – oh, it must be 20 years ago. A friend of mine, moving into a new house in Oregon in the States, he was able to go into his local sort of B&Q or hardware place and buy a heat pump. You could get them off the shelf. And this was a simple thing. It works like a refrigerator backwards – yes? And so, instead of pumping the heat out of your food and pushing it into the kitchen, you take the heat out of the local pond, if it’s there, or out of the soil, if it’s out there and you pump that heat – that’s low‑energy heat – you intensify it and you pump it into your house.
Now, at that time, the heat pump he was able to get, he had a bit of a pond in his garden and so on, he could get a heat pump which I think had an efficiency of two and a half. In other words, you put a kilowatt of energy into it and you get two and a half kilowatts out. Now, that sounds like good news to me. And this was available in the States 20 years ago. Now, what it needs is a bit of push from the Government and pull from the market, and surely we can switch over here? And there are opportunities for regeneration all along the way. And I think the same is true of conservation in a whole range of areas. Of course, it’s been so easy up to now because we’ve had cheap energy. I mean, energy is still too cheap, isn’t it?
Duncan Stewart
Yes. I mean, energy is still incredibly cheap, isn’t it? I mean, when I was a child, you know, labour was cheap and energy was expensive.
Aubrey Manning
Yes.
Duncan Stewart
It is completely reversed now and I think we’ve probably gone through a whole generation of oil at less than $20 a barrel.
Aubrey Manning
Yes.
Duncan Stewart
And now we’re facing a huge change.
Aubrey Manning
That’s right. I’ve got some maverick colleagues in Edinburgh who are dealing in a thing called ‘unitax’. I don’t expect many people – I certainly had never heard of it. But I can recommend a website for any of you who’ve got an idle hour and you’re just surfing the web. Punch in ‘Farrell Bradbury’, which is not a very common name. I can spell – F‑A‑R‑R‑E‑L‑L, I think he is, and Bradbury – B‑R‑A‑D‑B‑U‑R‑Y.
Farrell Bradbury is a heretic and therefore worth listening to, I think. He is in favour of shifting onto a carbon taxation system – energy taxation, actually. And so what he suggests is that a country – and it had better be Europe‑wide, I think, this – starts shifting from income tax to energy tax. And you, the Government of Europe says ‑ oh, if we only had one here ‑ it says, ‘Right. Over the next 20 years, we are going to shift’. So, 5% a year – 20 fives is 100. 5% a year we’re going to shift. Income tax is reduced by 5%; energy tax goes up 5%. 10%. And eventually you pay no income tax at all – but you pay a lot for energy.
His moral is that of the German economist/theoretician, Weissacher[?], who said, ‘Taxes should tell the truth’. And, at the moment, we tax our labour, which is infinitely renewable. So long as we’re alive and fit, we can go working. We have ideas. So we are renewable. But we don’t tax energy enough and energy is not renewable. Well, it may be one day if we ever can harness the solar power of the Sun and so on, but for the next 100 years energy is going to be very, increasingly expensive. So at the end of Farrell Bradbury’s 20 years, you’re paying no income tax, but you’re paying – what shall we say? – 50 euros for a litre of petrol.
Duncan Stewart
What do you feel about that?
Aubrey Manning
That’s horrific.
Duncan Stewart
Would anyone like to come in on that?
Aubrey Manning
But he does the sums – excuse me – he does the sums and he shows that actually you’re not doing so badly. And you’re being – and the whole of industry has changed over. It’s now intensely energy conservative.
Duncan Stewart
This is the economics.
Aubrey Manning
Economics. Yes.
Duncan Stewart
And, of course, economics is science too, is it not?
Aubrey Manning
Yes. Sure. Sure.
Question
I know in the States, you talk about the guy and the heat pump, but there are people who can generate their own power locally on their farms or wherever they are and put it back into the grid.
Aubrey Manning
Yes.
Question
That would be another way of approaching that, wouldn’t it, if we can produce – well, I don’t know how we could do that in a city, but certainly in rural areas we could be contributing back into the grid rather than drawing from it all the time.
Aubrey Manning
Sure.
Duncan Stewart
The heat pump is a great solution.
Aubrey Manning
Well, it’s one part.
Duncan Stewart
As you say, two and a half, even four to one coefficient performance. But the problem with this –
Aubrey Manning
Ah, you will know about this, of course. Yes.
Duncan Stewart
‑ the big problem with this is that – with heat pumps – and, I mean, it’s a good, a great technology, because it is working at, you know, 250% efficiency, up to 400%. But the problem is we’re generating electricity at such an incredibly low efficiency – a 35% efficiency. Two‑thirds are wasted before it –
Aubrey Manning
Oh, it makes you weep, makes you weep.
Duncan Stewart
‑ gets to our buildings. The problem with it is – and then it’s, in Ireland, it’s still 94% fossil fuel.
Aubrey Manning
I know.
Duncan Stewart
So we have two major problems with our electricity. And unless we do as you’re talking about, look to micro wind generation and to all of the sources of energy from the oceans and from wave energy, we’re not going to solve that problem.
Aubrey Manning
No.
Duncan Stewart
Because the same thing applies with our transport, doesn’t it? You know, are we going to continue with fossil fuels much longer for driving our cars or have we got to make a shift to electric cars? I mean, are these the challenges that we face with our transport too?
Question
With regards to overpopulation, you slightly suggested that the figure of 200,000 is a little bit alarming and you didn’t really go into what your thoughts were on that. So, can you be the heretic?
Aubrey Manning
Well, Duncan mentioned that I have been a conservationist since 1966, so that’s 42 years and that actually makes me quite an old stalwart, really, because I think one of the things we can take encouragement for is that we’ve had150 years of – more, nearly 200 years of industrial revolution and the increase of wealth, but we’ve only had about 40/50 years of people thinking, ‘Hey, wait a minute. This is not all the thing.’
So, well, yes, my thoughts are first of all that up to now it’s been the policy which dare not speak its name. It’s been regarded as something which is so intimate and personal and so connected to the most wonderful things in human life – having children, raising a family – that how could anybody possibly suggest that it’s not just your personal affair? It’s very difficult to get past that. And I think the only… one has to do it very gradually and, I mean, I repeat what I said. The first thing is to get a recognition that, actually, human numbers are part of the problem. I think we haven’t even got to that first base, if you like, yet. I don’t think many people would think it’s relevant yet, but it’s slowly come through. And as Duncan and I were talking before this meeting – and it’s slowly getting through.
About two weeks ago, one of our Government Ministers said that he thought – in fact, he, I think he went further and said that the Government would not wish the population of Britain to rise above 70 million. It’s 63 million at the moment, I think. Boy, that is an achievement. I mean, that is the first time anybody has ever said that. And, you know, I’ve been involved in lobbying MPs and so on for a long time and most of them don’t reply, two or three say you’re right and about 10 write abusively – we can’t interfere and so on.
But, of course, Government policies across the world have tended to make people have more children than they might at first want. They’ve made various types of family planning difficult. They’ve prohibited abortion. They’ve kept – we’ve had very poor educational status for women, so that women have got no power within many cultures and so on. All of these things have tended to increase the birth rate. And I would agree that on many occasions children are wonderful and they have a way of making you love them. That’s how they survive. And so many of these children, who were not initially wanted, become welcome members of the family, but many do not. You can buy children in many countries of the world right now. Many children are left abandoned in Mexico, in Kenya – my son works in Kenya. I know this. There are a lot of unwanted children.
Duncan Stewart
60% of births, I think, are unwanted on the planet today.
Aubrey Manning
I’d believe that.
Duncan Stewart
60%.
Aubrey Manning
I could believe that. And what we want is every child a wanted child from before conception. And if we do that, as we were saying before, the basic birth rates of the whole of Europe are below replacement level. But that is terrifying to many politicians, who think, ‘We’re going to run out of labour. We don’t have people to pay pensions. We’re going to have shortages of skills.’ and so on. But this doesn’t really make any sense. Firstly, I don’t think most people realise their full potential. Secondly, to increase the birth rate, to encourage, as Australia and Germany are actively at the moment encouraging an increase in the birth rate, to do that in order to solve the pension problem is a bit simple‑minded, isn’t it? Because the new people whom you’re adding to the population are also going to grow up and get older and want pensions. And so you’re going to have to have more children born to replace them, and so the population’s going to go on growing, because you’re always going to need more and more babies born to pay the pensions 60 years down the line. I mean, it’s not exactly rocket science, is it?
Duncan Stewart
How do you deal with the subject, too, of all of us wanting to see everybody living a higher quality of life, a higher standard of living, and when we look at us in Ireland, you know, every one of us on average emits 17.5 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. And we compare with people in the developing world, who are very poor and, if you like, undernourished, who are starving to a great extent, but they would be, we would be contributing 200 times the CO2 emissions of them. But yet we want everybody to rise out of poverty. How will this planet deal with that issue? What’s the answer to it?
Aubrey Manning
I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think there is an answer, frankly. I really don’t. I think the trouble is that we are in such – I don’t know what, what’s the opposite of a fireproof position? A fire‑vulnerable position. How can we preach to India or Pakistan or Bangladesh or Burkina Faso and say, ‘Look, I’m sorry. We think that you really had better not develop your economy. You certainly better not develop your transport system, reliable, depending on cars, because there isn’t any, there’s not enough fuel to go round and anyway the world’s going to…’ – how can we go to them and say that? I don’t understand.
It has to come from two ways. I mean, we have to get people above a certain level. We can’t sit by without that. But surely it must mean sacrifice on our part. I don’t see – and how are we to get sacrifice on our part? How is anybody going to suggest de‑growth? I’m sorry, I don’t want to – I was determined, absolutely determined not to preach doom and gloom. It’s so counterproductive.
You know, there was a Paul Ehrlich who wrote in 1965, I think, a book called, The Population Bomb, which was very, very influential. He was asked to go everywhere and he made a lot of money. And he actually used to hire private jets to fly on his lecture tours and so on. And somebody said to him, ‘Paul, how can you possibly live this life of luxury when you’re telling us that the world’s going to hell in a handcart?’ And he said, ‘Well, if you know you’re on the Titanic, why travel steerage?’ Desperately cynical. But what is one to say?
This is what the United Nations should be debating, instead of how to stop genocide in Sudan, how to stop fighting in the Congo. This is poor people scrabbling for some of the Earth’s resources, trying to build executive jets, trying to stuff Swiss bank accounts, because, believe you me, and those of you who have any knowledge of Africa, I have a little knowledge of Africa, boy, does Africa deserve better politicians than it has now. It’s a desperate situation.
I don’t have any easy solution to that. I suppose all I can say that’s encouraging is that more and more people are slowly coming round to this kind of thinking and more and more young people too. Among young people, there is a feeling, a desperate feeling that it can’t go on. I mean, it may not be going in the right channels, but it was impossible not to feel moved by the sight of those crowds of young people at Obama’s rallies and so on. They were hungry for something, weren’t they? And, I mean, it’s maybe not the kind of solutions that I’m seeking for here or maybe you are seeking for, I don’t know, but it’s, I mean, that’s the encouraging thing. I mean, I think that’s why I love being a teacher, because each year you get a new injection of monkey glands, a new lot of young people come up.
Duncan Stewart
Well, it’s amazing when you think eight years ago we had the Bush administration and Cheney and Rumsfeld and all of this on top of us. And now the US has, if you like, made an about turn. Now, it does show that there is hope there. That one can go from this incredible, you know, neo‑cons that were bringing the US into such an incredible situation. The Iraq War, all of the implications. But now we’ve seen that there is hope there.
Aubrey Manning
Yes.
Duncan Stewart
That the people can actually vote. To me, it’s incredible to think that what’s happened in the US. You know, this is something that we have never in my life experienced and it’s incredible that it’s happened.
Aubrey Manning
I agree. I agree.
Duncan Stewart
And there is hope.
Aubrey Manning
Absolutely. There is indeed. And, you know, James Burke said it all. You may think you can’t do much, but just talking to your neighbours and… I’ve got a 22‑year‑old son and I’m just trying to get him, get him engaged in it. You know, I naïvely sort of sat him down the other day and said – he’s interested in acting, he wants to be an actor – I said, ‘Come on, Josh, look, I just want you to know, you know, the sort of things I’ve been engaged in here’. ‘Don’t worry, Dad, I know about that. We’re knowing about that. We’ve got, you know, we’ve got a play going in Glasgow which is about environmental resources. Don’t worry.’ I felt a bit better. I mean, young people are… it’s, it’s their world. It’s, you know, there are a lot, there’s enough left of the beautiful world left to see me through, but, I mean, anybody who has children is attached to the future. We are attached to the future.
Question
I think the thing in Ireland I feel that we’re slightly lacking in the kind of outputs that should be about the environment and sustainability and not just programmes sectioned off for them, but it’s actually in public discourse and on politics shows. It’s just not something that I hear enough of. And I think the BBC is obviously under so much fire now and here’s hoping that the Daily Mail can’t bring them down, because it would be a huge disservice, I think, to society in the future if the BBC wasn’t there and able to do the kind of programming that they’re able to do at the moment.
I think on the note about science, from my point of view, in Ireland we slightly lack people like yourself, I mean, people who are very, very passionate and very able to speak in a very engaging way and willingly to the public. And I don’t, you know, want to offend any scientists, but I think we need more scientists who are willing to come out and engage in a very accessible way with the public in Ireland.
Duncan Stewart
You mentioned the media, by the way. Is the media doing enough in Ireland? How do you feel? Television? I’m in television. Radio, press media? Is there enough going on in the media to bring out science and to bring out a lot of this, the information that needs to be brought out? Is that happening or not happening in Ireland? Any comments on that?
Question
I think that mankind will start thinking only when they hit the bottom. Until some people are doing well, some not, the levels of life are so different – a huge gap between the levels of life here and there. And since we can think, Ireland can think about its own part of the world, we have only a world shared between all of us. So we can fix, we can solve much easier tasks all together. I mean, just tourism or, you know, you name it. It’s a lot of unsolved tasks we can solve, I mean, mankind as a group.
So I think we will have only a very small amount of time when we hit the bottom and we, all of us, just realise, OK, we couldn’t see the Sun tomorrow. Only then will people start really thinking, not only like, you know. I appreciate your efforts. I greatly, you know, I love you, but the point is that you are just only one of millions of people who don’t care and they wouldn’t care about the Earth because they don’t have food to eat and every minute a child dies because of hunger and because of politicians’ ambitions, the elite’s, so‑called, ambitions and so on. It’s like turbulence on the oars, something is caught, and we always have cycles in turbulence, because, you know, something hot and cold flows and so on.
The same in our society. Someone poor, someone rich. It’s always moving, a lust for power, a lust for a better life. You know, mass media. It depends on the country. In Ireland, mass media; in other countries, just, you know, different. So, I’m afraid, you know, pessimistic. I mean, just at the moment there is all these things that, you know, it will happen maybe after my death, which is actually not good news for my son, but maybe, you know. I mean, just a kind of pessimistic note. I’m sorry for this after this lecture.
Aubrey Manning
OK, but, I mean, if I can summarise maybe what your views are is that things have got to get worse before they get better, and I think I agree with that. That means more kicks on the shin, more taps on the shoulder. But I do believe that this financial turmoil at the moment will set minds powerfully thinking, actually. I do believe that we can get some benefit from this. But of course the fact is that, for most people in the world still, life is a real struggle and the only they can live is by overexploiting and destroying some of the Earth’s resources. I mean, the way that soils are being used, the way that water is being used and so on. And we’re to blame because the way we’re using fossil energy is infinitely destructive – very difficult to go back. Sorry. I beg your pardon. There’s somebody up at the back there.
Duncan Stewart
This is the last question. Yes? Thank you.
Question
I have to first make an admission. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit I’m an economist, so.
Aubrey Manning
OK.
Duncan Stewart
Economists are scientists.
Question
I want to make an observation about the science community, if I may. Do – I mean, I don’t understand all the detail, but are you telling me that the science community actually have the answers and we just need to go to it, or what are you telling us?
Duncan Stewart
If you were leading the world, what would you do as a scientist to heal the problems of this planet?
Aubrey Manning
Well, I think I’m almost going to pass on that, but to respond to you, sir, I don’t believe that technologically, technically the problems are that difficult, actually, because I think we have the way to generate sufficient energy, for instance, for everybody to have a very reasonable standard of living, but it would be lower than now. Science doesn’t have an answer to enabling people to accept a material standard of living, shall we say one‑third less than it is now, which would be quite reasonable. After all, I grew up in the war, with rationing and no travel. We were very happy and lived well. But now we find that unacceptable. And I was quoting to you a wonderful old song, ‘How are you going to keep her down on the farm after she’s seen Paris?’ And that’s the trouble, isn’t it, with us? That we now have such high expectations. But if we took, I mean, that’s what… so many people argue with me about population control. They say that population isn’t the problem; it’s distribution of resources. If we distributed the world’s resources more evenly, we’ve got plenty. Well, we could cope just about, but, I mean, there’s still 200,000 extra a day. So I don’t think ‑ science doesn’t have the answers to the social problems, which are the ones that the Archbishop of Dublin is addressing. That’s people’s attitudes, and that’s for all of us. We’re all of us in that equally, whether we are economists or biologists or gravediggers. It’s the same for all of us.
But what would I do first? I think I would try to call in Farrell Bradbury as an adviser and see if we could get going on a switch away to energy conservation. I think it would generate a huge amount of economic activity. Mind you, I suspect he’d be a difficult person to deal with. If I tell you that if you go onto his website, you will have an amusing time because one of his other interests is creating the ecologically conservative golf course. He thinks that many people would benefit from having golf courses. He has designed golf courses for the roofs of large buildings, which give you all the 500‑yard drives and so on and so forth. He’s a clever, if eccentric man. But I think he’s got something to say to us.
But, look, everybody would have their own thing. The first recognition is, you know, to come to the nature of our situation, come back to it again, recognising that the Earth is not limitless.
Duncan Stewart
Thank you, Professor. And, you know, what a wonderful talk and, I think, very, very good interaction. And thanks everybody for coming here tonight and participating in this discussion. I’d like to acknowledge Discover Science & Engineering, who’s the organisers of Science Week, and the Science Gallery here for hosting the event. Also, this lecture will also be available on the Science Week website, which is www.scienceweek.ie, from next week to encourage people to get involved.
Also, I think, just to say that Discover Science & Engineering is the national integrated awareness programme managed by Forfás on behalf of the Office of Science and Technology. Its objectives are to increase the numbers of students studying the physical sciences, to promote a positive attitude to careers in science, engineering and technology, and to foster a greater understanding of science and its value in Irish society. And they have a website, www.discover-science.ie. And I think that’s just something just to mention, because I think we’re all here because of our belief in science and I think, Professor, you’ve inspired us tonight about our hope and belief and the love for science, because that’s where we have to go. We need science and we need scientists, and we need a scientific approach to this planet if we are going to face the challenges. So, thank you, Professor.
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