Kerry Emanuel presented to us on the revolutions in climatic science. He approached the subject from an interesting perspective. He focused more on the future. More on weather condition predictions. He acknowledged that climate science has a long and illustrious history. Speaking from his long years of experience he pointed out that important discoveries are driven by curiosity about evidence gathering.
Emauel believes in the work of those who did it before him, he gives credit to them for setting a foundation in the field. He emphasized on Jean Baptiste Joseph who came up with the fourier series and developed early comprehensive theory of how heat flows. He was curious about why the earth’s temperature is what it is. Baptiste came up with an analogy of heat flow through solids.
Kerry believes that quantum physics is a very essential field to science and to humanity. He argues that it should be taught in high school. He illustrated Max Plack’s experiments, that after several attempts to explain experimentally derived black body curves in 1900. Planck engaged in an act of despair. He later hypothesized that radiant energy is quantisized in discrete packets rather than being continuous. He came with the field of quantum physics.
All these physicists and mathematicians got the modern world thinking that we are finally on a path toward controlling climate. These are creditable developments, but the world is still a very long way from preventing profound long-term climate change. Getting serious about climate change would require more than nibbling around the edges of energy policy.There’s always a fine balance in gauging how to convey the value of incremental progress against the scale of a huge problem. Putting too much weight in small steps can obscure glaring gaps in addressing the grander challenge. I see the prospect of slow but substantial and productive shifts in the human enterprise.