Nobel Laureate to Speak in Rockland on Global Warming and Energy Supply
Talking Big — A continent devolving into the Dark Ages has the power to turn the lights on
— by Christine Parrish
It’s hard to know just what the future holds for a newborn baby, but parents always dream. A baby is pure potential at birth and any future seems possible. When a Jewish couple, both teachers in a small German town, held baby Jack in their arms, they did not know the future held Hitler. It is equally unlikely that they could have predicted that Jack would grow up to be one of only 777 people, as of today, to be awarded The Nobel Prize.
Jack Steinberger, by luck and circumstance, escaped the Holocaust. His parents sent him and his brother to the U.S. in 1934 when American Jewish Charities offered to find homes for 300 German refugee children. And in 1938 the family with whom Jack and his brother were living in Chicago helped the rest of his immediate family to emigrate and reunite in Chicago.
Steinberger went on to discover one of a family of elementary particles called neutrinos that are produced in the sun, where atoms break down in the intense heat. The neutrino has no size—an odd concept for non-physicists. The neutrino Steinberger discovered, the second of three that have been observed, is now established in the lexicon of particle physics.
And in 1988 Jack Steinberger, Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz were awarded The Nobel Prize in Physics “for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.”
And the practical application of the neutrino? None known, according to Steinberger. Given that the most notable practical applications of particle physics have been nuclear power and the atom bomb, Steinberger says it might be a good thing the neutrino is lying low.
In 1968, Steinberger joined CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centers for scientific research. Though retired, Steinberger, now 86 years old, still bicycles the 10 km from his home to his office at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, each day.
His main interest in recent years centers on global warming and what can be done about it. He is convinced by the scientific evidence that the intense heat of the sun is playing out another role here on earth. Global climate change, he argues, is the dominant social, economic and environmental problem of our time.
Failing crops, reduced water supplies, financial consequences, famine and social unrest are just some of the fallout. The unrest in Africa, he notes, seems destined only to get worse as the climate warms.
Jack Steinberger rides the 10 km from his home to his office at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, every day. He will give a talk about global warming and energy supply next Sunday, April 6, at 3 p.m. at Rockland City Hall.
It’s not exactly headline news. After all, Al Gore won a Nobel himself for putting the spotlight on climate change; and for those who were paying attention, it has been a red-button issue since the late 1980s. And Steinberger is hardly alone in advocating that we must reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and dramatically cut our CO2 emissions. By now, the term “carbon footprint” has stepped out of academic papers and made it into crossword puzzles.
So, what do we do about it? Go solar?
Exactly, says Steinberger. But he’s not talking about rigging up a house with solar panels to heat the hot water. He’s not talking small. He’s talking big.
“The African desert is the perfect area for electric power generating stations,” said Steinberger from his home in Geneva, Switzerland.
According to Steinberger, Morocco, Algeria and other stable north African countries could generate the power to light up Europe and create domestic power supplies with solar thermal power plants while also plugging into a stable source of income.
Steinberger, who will be visiting family in Maine next week, will give a talk on global warming and energy supply on Sunday, April 6, at 3 p.m. in the City Council chambers at Rockland City Hall.
“You’ll have to come to the lecture to hear the details,” said Steinberger. Briefly, commercial solar thermal power plants that generate no greenhouse gases are now operating in Spain using a method of storing heat produced by the sun rather than storing electricity, as is typically done on a small scale in home-based solar electricity generation. Heat, says Steinberger, is easier and cheaper to store than electricity and can be converted when needed.
“The generating plants in operation now, in Spain, are only about 50 megawatts. A typical power plant is ten times bigger—about 500 megawatts,” says Steinberger, noting that it is the larger scale that is needed for a serious effort to provide electricity efficiently.
Spain is one of the sunniest countries in Europe, and the government has embraced solar thermal power generation with a target of providing 12 percent of its energy from solar by 2010, according to the Trade Commission of Spain. Scheduled for completion this year, the Spanish thermal power plants in Andalusia will be the largest in the world to date. Germany has invested in the effort and already receives 80 percent of the electricity generated from the existing Spanish plants, according to Environment News Service. The Andalusian thermal plants will replace the need for building more fossil fuel generating stations and contribute to the effort to slow climate change, according to ENS.
“We need to do something for the future to prevent catastrophic consequences, one of which is that people who are barely surviving now on agricultural land in Africa will not be able to make a living. Social tensions will continue to go up,” Steinberger says, spinning out the on-the-ground effects of climate change. That kind of instability will be far reaching, he says, and the developed countries won’t be spared from the resulting social effects.
The evidence that the current change in climate has accelerated is irrefutable, says Steinberger: Anyone who argues otherwise is not paying sufficient attention to the data.
“We must do something about it. It’s not easy and I’m not optimistic, but we must try.”