Voces - Sir John Houghton

Why are people doubting still that there is climate change. Well there are lots of reasons, of course, but the obvious reason is that people don’t know enough to know whether they should doubt it or not. Why don’t they know enough? because they don’t listen to the right people or they don’t study the evidence at all but they look to newspapers or internet or whatever to get the answers and they get very varied answers from people, again, who know nothing, or people with vested interests, they’re very powerful people with vested interests who are very keen not to go away from fossil fuels like coal and oil and gas because they get some sort of money from them. Well there are lots of things that everybody can do, it depends who you are of course, if you are an ordinary person you can become much more efficient in your use of energy, you can do things like buy electric cars, not using petrol, is it better you could cut down various ways in which you create, in which you use fossil fuels and so, you could make your home much more efficient, lots of things that individual people can do but then they also need to get government’s to come in and do their thing, because governments are the only people who can really set up a system whereby the old energy system changes from one which is based on coal and oil and gas to one which is based on renewables, and that really needs a lot of political pressure and power as well so we should be supporting those political actions are not listening to the vested interests of people who try to destroy it. Should we not be investing more in renewable energy? The answer to that is yes but that means who is going to do the investment and of course we need help in investing in these things which means we have to persuade the governments or the industries or whoever they are to do it too, and the reason we should be doing it is because we’ve got to cut our fossil fuel, we must stop carbon getting into the atmosphere to spoil the planet but also there are other reasons for doing it too because it will save money in the long run.

It will save pollution we’ve an awful lot of pollution from from 02:54 - conventional energy sources, and many of them are very insecure, we get more security if we get our energy from elsewhere too, so there are lots of very good reasons for doing it and it won’t cost us very much in fact in the long run it will cost us less than nothing there are governments taking proper measures to combat global warming They’re doing something many governments are doing something but are they doing enough the answer is no because we have to do a lot more in order to change at the rate we need to change and it’s very urgent to do that because of the damage that’s going to come from global warming damage in terms of in terms of heat waves in terms of storms in terms of floods in terms of droughts in terms of all sorts of problems we don’t want so we’ve got to do something about it and and so governments and people and industries have to get together and I’ve often, I’ve talked to industry sometimes about it and also to banks because banks have lots of money to invest but they’ll only invest if governments provide a framework whereby it’s going to work and if they’ve got confidence for the future in what they do for big projects so governments have to come in and give them that confidence by providing a framework and it seems to a naive person like me that if only governments and industry could sit around the table for an afternoon they could sort it out, so why they don’t I don’t know. Well I do, is Spain contributing enough I don’t know a lot about what happens in Spain but I do know that Spain has done a lot in terms of the sorts of renewable energy in particular solar energy, making, getting solar energy both from photovoltaic energy and also from boiling water and creating steam engines and so on by doing it that way and it’s a very good place there are big big project in Spain working on that, so there has been quite a lot done in Spain but I’m told they have now turned around and that’s a pity because they should get on with it because it’s the real future What do I think about the IAC and the Canary Islands, are there opportunities here but it’s a wonderful part of the world it’s a beautiful part of the world. Twenty years ago we came for holidays here several times and enjoyed them very much and I’ve been longing come back and in particular of course to see all your observatories the way those have grown and you’ve got some of the very best astronomical observatories in the world doing work right in the frontier of what people are able to do and that’s that’s very exciting I was very excited for the people who were telling me about it and the enthusiasm which they are trying to solve the problems of the cosmos especially from the island of La Palma of which is a wonderful thing to try to do so I think it’s the correct place and I wish you very well in all of that and the IAC is must be one of the best of its kind in the world and you’ve the enthusiasm of people here and the way they work together and the way they do things for othe people too andl work with others around the world it’s also, it must be very rewarding you .