Engineers can inject realism

One nugget of information is that the world population has increased from 6 billion in 2000 to 6.45 billion in 2005. If this rate continues, in 20 years the CO2 emission of the human race will be about 1.3 billion tones, rising at 0.5 billion tonnes every five years. Add the output from animals and plants and it comes to quite a lot.

I would be more impressed by the projections of 2,500 scientists had I not seen a TV programme about the new, highly expensive toy called the Hadron Collider, which we have given them to try to find out what happened in the first few milliseconds of the Big Bang 13 billion years ago – information I can hardly wait to hear. The TV presenter proudly announced that this piece of kit will, when operating, use as much electricity as a city of 500,000 people.

The climate change professionals urge politicians to take urgent, unspecified action. Well we all know what that means – an excuse for more and more taxes. Witness the proposals for “road pricing” etc. The well-to-do will not be affected, of course, and environmentalists will still be able to fly to exotic locations for more conferences on global warming.

It is high time that engineers got involved and introduced some realistic proposals to deal with the situation. At the risk of being dubbed an upstart I offer the following:

• as a working assumption, take it that we must tackle the emissions of CO2, methane etc;
• energy efficiency is desirable in its own right and should be vigorously pursued;
• use existing technology to control CO2 output from fossil-fuelled electricity generation and fund research to improve this;
• consider how non-man-made emissions might be reduced;
• actively pursue natural methods of absorbing CO2 – plant forests etc;
• set up an independent global monitoring system to make regular factual reports to the public;
• produce an overall strategic plan to assess the various options – their practicality; their likely cost and benefits;
• start now on engineering measures to alleviate the expected adverse effects of climate change on vulnerable areas – for example flood protection, desalinisation plants, water reservoirs and pipelines.