The Perimeter Institute is a futuristic-looking place where over 250 physicists are thinking about quantum gravity, quantum information theory, cosmology and the like. Since I work on some of these things, I was recently invited to give the weekly colloquium there. But I took the opportunity to try to rally them into action:

• Energy and the Environment: What Physicists Can Do. Watch the video or read the slides.

Abstract. The global warming crisis is part of a bigger transformation in which humanity realizes that the Earth is a finite system and that our population, energy usage, and the like cannot continue to grow exponentially. While politics and economics pose the biggest challenges, physicists are in a good position to help make this transition a bit easier. After a quick review of the problems, we discuss a few ways physicists can help.

On the video you can hear me say a lot of stuff that’s not on the slides: it’s more of a coherent story. The advantage of the slides is that anything in blue, you can click on to get more information. So for example, when I say that solar power capacity has been growing annually by 75% in recent years, you can see where I got that number.

I was pleased by the response to this talk. Naturally, it was not a case of physicists saying “okay, tomorrow I’ll quit working on the foundations of quantum mechanics and start trying to improve quantum dot solar cells.” It’s more about getting them to see that huge problems are looming ahead of us… and to see the huge opportunities for physicists who are willing to face these problems head-on, starting now. Work on energy technologies, the smart grid, and ‘ecotechnology’ is going to keep growing. I think a bunch of the younger folks, at least, could see this.

However, perhaps the best immediate outcome of this talk was that Lee Smolin introduced me to Manjana Milkoreit. She’s at the school of international affairs at Waterloo University, practically next door to the Perimeter Institute. She works on “climate change governance, cognition and belief systems, international security, complex systems approaches, especially threshold behavior, and the science-policy interface.”

So, she knows a lot about the all-important human and political side of climate change. Right now she’s interviewing diplomats involved in climate treaty negotiations, trying to see what they believe about climate change. And it’s very interesting!

In my next post, I’ll talk about something she pointed me to. Namely: what we can do to hold the temperature increase to 2 °C or less, given that the pledges made by various nations aren’t enough.