What Does a Nobel Laurate Understand about CO2? 1

Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969 for the Standard Model of elementary particles, is one of the Nobel Laurates to decide about the future of humanity at the Nobel Laurate Symposium on Global Sustainability at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, May 16-19,

The Executive Summary of Scientific Background states:

• Evidence that the Earth is warming by human emissions of greenhouse gases is unequivocal
• fossil fuel raising CO2 above the limits of the Holocene
• exit door from the Holocene had been opened
• Great Acceleration: human population tripled, consumption in the global economy grew many times faster
• Great Acceleration has not been an environmentally benign phenomenon
• eroding the Earth’s resilience, ocean acidification.

The agenda for the meeting is presented by The German Advisory Council on Global Change, chaired by Prof. Dr. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, as a Summary for Policy Makers: World in Transition, A Social Contract for Sustainability:

• carbon-based model unsustainable
• low-carbon society is a Great Transformation
• global energy system decarbonised
• greenhouse gas emissions absolute minimum
• low-carbon societies
• quantum leap for civilisation
• universal consensus
• Global Enlightenment
• new social contract
• science subservient role
• sustainability is a question of imagination.

The purpose of the meeting is to get Nobel Laurates of Physics and Chemistry to confirm on scientific grounds that CO2 emission is the big threat to human civilization.

The Nobel Laurates will form the jury of a Tribunal facing Humanity with charges of destroying the Earth (by CO2 emission).

We ask the questions:

• Do Nobel Laurates understand the role of CO2 for global climate?
• Do Nobel Laurates say that society will have to be decarbonized by 2050?

and will report on answers..stay tuned...

PS Johan Rockström (organizer) and Andreas Carlgren (minister) write in DN Debate to prepare the Swedish opinion:

• To avoid catastrophical climate change, many scientists believe that CO2 emisssion from fossil fuels must stop by 2050.
• This requires resources to renewable energy of unprecedented size.

Note the term many scientists, not as before all scientists... This seems to be an acknowledgement that there are also many scientists who consider CO2 emission to not be harmful at all.

What if the jury was changed to the latter group of scientists? What would then the charges be? Who would then sit on the accused bench?

The Final Solution by The Royal Swedish Academy

The third Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability is coming up:

• Together with Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will bring together some of the world’s most renowned thinkers and experts on global sustainability, 16-19 May 2011 in Stockholm. Only for invited guests.

The agenda for the meeting is presented by The German Advisory Council on Global Change, chaired by Prof. Dr. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, as a Summary for Policy Makers: World in Transition, A Social Contract for Sustainability:

• Normatively, the carbon-based economic model is also an unsustainable situation.
• The transformation towards a low-carbon society is therefore as much an ethical imperative as the abolition of slavery and the condemnation of child labour.
• This structural transition is the start of a "Great Transformation" into a sustainable society, which must inevitably proceed within the planetary guard rails of sustainability.
• By the middle of the century, the global energy systems must largely be decarbonised.
• Production, consumption patterns and lifestyles in all of the three key transformation fields must be changed in such a way that global greenhouse gas emissions are reduced to an absolute minimum over the coming decades, and low-carbon societies can develop.
• The extent of the transformation ahead of us can barely be overestimated.
• In terms of profound impact, it is comparable to the two fundamental transformations in the world‘s history:
• the Neolithic Revolution, i.e. the invention and spreading of farming and animal husbandry, and the Industrial Revolution, meaning the transition from agricultural to industrialised society.
• This would be something of a quantum leap for civilisation.
• It should in principle also be possible to reach a universal consensus regarding human civilisation's ability to survive within the natural boundaries imposed by planet Earth.
• This necessarily presupposes an extensive "Global Enlightenment".
• So nothing less than a new social contract must be agreed to.
• Science will play a decisive, although subservient, role here.
• Ultimately, sustainability is a question of imagination.

In other words, a Final Solution to the Carbon Question will be presented by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The basic idea is to comb Europe through from West to East from North to South for carbon and transport it to Eastern Poland, where it will be gassed (in special camps, see picture above).

This will secure a carbon-free sustainable Europe, which will serve as a model for the rest of the world including its 3 billion people who still do not have access to essential modern energy services.

The Symposium will conclude with a memorandum signed by key Nobel Laureates, crowned by a dinner hosted by King Carl XVI Gustaf.

Among the invited 50 of the world’s most renowned thinkers, we find:

• Martin Rees, President Royal Society,
• Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Peace Prize 1990
• Andreas Carlgren, Swedish Minister of Environment
• Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize in Physics 1969 for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.
• David Gross, Nobel Prize in Physics 2004 for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.
• Johan Rockström, Stockholm Resilience Center
• Anders Wijkman, Stockholm Environment Institute.

Note that the key Nobel Laurates when signing the memorandum accept that science will play a subservient role.

It is natural to compare with Manifesto of the Ninety-Three and the suppression of quantum mechanics and relativity in the Soviet Union as "idealistic" and "bourgeois", and in Nazi-Germany as "Jewish physics".