Sir John's university address proves the adage

by Robert McLean

The promise of something and its reality are frequently quite different.

The UK's Chief Scientific
 Advisor, Sir John Beddington.

That was wholly evident in listening to the UK’s chief scientific advisor, Sir John Beddington.

Sir John was the special guest at a free public lecture at the University of Melbourne on Thursday, October 9.

Speaking to an audience of more than 200 people, he discussed “The inescapable challenges of the early 21^st Century: sustainability and resilience and the interconnected challenges of energy, water, food and climate”.

The promise was that Sir John would clearly articulate the difficulties ahead and then illustrate what he saw as clearly workable solutions we could turn to as we address those daunting challenges.

He certainly spelt out those challenges, but many of the solutions he referred to where yet little more than an untested idea and where it had been tried was found to be inadequate.

As the UK’s chief scientific advisor, Sir John has access to the best information in the world, but his manner of understanding and articulating that appears to be contrary to what is an can be done.

Somewhat disenchanted by his approach to the dilemmas, I felt an urgent need to share my frustrations with someone and so I chose a Beneath the Wisteria supporter who is well aware of how the world’s climate is changing.

Here is what I wrote and email to our friend, all of which were sentiments with which he largely agreed.

Listening to Sir John Beddington at the Spot Basement Theatre last night, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had been misinformed, misunderstood all I had read and subsequently was misdirected in my thinking about the challenges humanity faces.

Everything he said coalesced with much of what I understand to be correct, but he appeared to have a misplaced optimism about how we will deal with our injured climate. My view is contrarily quite different and far less optimistic.

The direction humanity needs to take has, in my view, been decided by an implacable entity, the environment.

Many of the escape methods discussed by Sir John are either only in their formative stages or have been shown to be unworkable.

Of course, many things he discussed were clearly accurate and supported by verifiable facts, but beyond that he made, or so it seemed, no allowances for the unintended consequences of some of the proposed resolutions.

I dare not challenge Sir John as he is far more knowledgeable and has access to a far richer knowledge network than I do, but his optimism about our future left me feeling somewhat quizzical.