The Australian researchers who discovered that "diamond planet" a few weeks ago reflect on how different things could have been if only they were researching climate change instead.

http://theconversation.edu.au/diamond-p ... ethod-3329

Recently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar.

Based on the planet’s density, and the likely history of its system, we concluded that it was certain to be crystalline. In other words, we had discovered a planet made of diamond.

Following the publication of our finding in the journal Science, our research received amazing attention from the world’s media.

The diamond planet was featured in Time Magazine, the BBC and China Daily, to name but a few.

I was asked by many journalists about the significance of the discovery. If I were honest, I’d have to concede that, although worthy of publication in Science, in the field of astrophysics it isn’t that significant.

Sure, there are probably somewhere between six and a dozen quite important theoretical astrophysicists around the world who would have been thrilled at the news (after all, the diamond planet fills a gap in the binary pulsar family).

But in the overall scheme of things, it isn’t that important.

And yet the diamond planet has been hugely successful in igniting public curiosity about the universe in which we live.

In that sense, for myself and my co-authors, I suspect it will be among the greatest discoveries of our careers.

Our host institutions were thrilled with the publicity and most of us enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame. The attention we received was 100% positive, but how different that could have been.

How so? Well, we could have been climate scientists.

Imagine for a minute that, instead of discovering a diamond planet, we’d made a breakthrough in global temperature projections.

Let’s say we studied computer models of the influence of excessive greenhouse gases, verified them through observations, then had them peer-reviewed and published in Science.

Instead of sitting back and basking in the glory, I suspect we’d find a lot of commentators, many with no scientific qualifications, pouring scorn on our findings.

People on the fringe of science would be quoted as opponents of our work, arguing that it was nothing more than a theory yet to be conclusively proven.

(Continued) http://theconversation.edu.au/diamond-p ... ethod-3329

Ihavenofingerprints wrote:The Australian researchers who discovered that "diamond planet" a few weeks ago reflect on how different things could have been if only they were researching climate change instead.

http://theconversation.edu.au/diamond-p ... ethod-3329

Recently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar.

Based on the planet’s density, and the likely history of its system, we concluded that it was certain to be crystalline. In other words, we had discovered a planet made of diamond.

Following the publication of our finding in the journal Science, our research received amazing attention from the world’s media.

The diamond planet was featured in Time Magazine, the BBC and China Daily, to name but a few.

I was asked by many journalists about the significance of the discovery. If I were honest, I’d have to concede that, although worthy of publication in Science, in the field of astrophysics it isn’t that significant.

Sure, there are probably somewhere between six and a dozen quite important theoretical astrophysicists around the world who would have been thrilled at the news (after all, the diamond planet fills a gap in the binary pulsar family).

But in the overall scheme of things, it isn’t that important.

And yet the diamond planet has been hugely successful in igniting public curiosity about the universe in which we live.

In that sense, for myself and my co-authors, I suspect it will be among the greatest discoveries of our careers.

Our host institutions were thrilled with the publicity and most of us enjoyed our 15 minutes of fame. The attention we received was 100% positive, but how different that could have been.

How so? Well, we could have been climate scientists.

Imagine for a minute that, instead of discovering a diamond planet, we’d made a breakthrough in global temperature projections.

Let’s say we studied computer models of the influence of excessive greenhouse gases, verified them through observations, then had them peer-reviewed and published in Science.

Instead of sitting back and basking in the glory, I suspect we’d find a lot of commentators, many with no scientific qualifications, pouring scorn on our findings.

People on the fringe of science would be quoted as opponents of our work, arguing that it was nothing more than a theory yet to be conclusively proven.

(Continued) http://theconversation.edu.au/diamond-p ... ethod-3329

I think the attention they got lasted more like 15 seconds, not 15 minutes. Anyone who blinked missed the story.

Not every scientist can or should be a climate scientist, there's work to be done in every field. Climate science has grown to now include some 10,000 scientists from 150 countries who work on various aspects and facets of the field, and the 2,500 who write the IPCC's Assessment Reports. IPCC staff review some 10,000 scientific papers and reports in each five-year cycle of their AR reporing program, and correlate what they're reporting in climate science terms. That's a fairly big enterprise, global in scope, and growing by the minute.

That effort has given us everything we need to know to be advocates for policies and efforts that reduce carbon pollution in the atmosphere, which has proceeded apace at a volume that's now running 30 gigatons a year, and rising. We know we've already loaded the atmosphere with enough carbon to drive Earth's mean annual temperature up by some 2C come the year 2100. We know this will only grow worse if we keep polluting at the level we are today, and we'll soon be looking at a 4C rise, then a 5C rise, then a 6C rise. And while those kinds of increases seem small and inconsequential to the unaided eye, they are comparable to the temp increase that ended the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago and brought us the Holocene.

So we know.

Now it's time to act.

We know that if we do not act and continue to tolerate a BAU scenario in our energy production and use, there's going to be climate hell to pay down the road just a few short decades from today. We may not know the full details of the timing and the shape and the extent of that climate hell but we know it'll be severe at best and could even become catastrophic.

Hence, all concerned should have their eye's on the ball, which is cutting emissions. That's Job One.

Job Two is amping the hell out of the green energy industry, which can be done ... we know how to multitask. And we can't do Job One without doing Job Two. Job Two is what makes Job One feasible.

There's your marching orders.

Nice find Ihavenofingerprints!

Woah! They found a planet made of carbon in a dense crystal lattice?