Time to declare a war on weather

Scientists tackling climate change should be put on a war-footing, says robert matthews

If you want big scientific problems solved in a hurry, you can't beat a good war. From antibiotics to computers, radar to rocketry, countless breakthroughs were turbo-charged by the wars of the last century.

Today, many regard global warming as the big scientific problem. They would also insist governments are not taking it seriously enough. The answer may lie in convincing politicians to mount a war against the evil forces of climatic change.

History suggests the effect would be dramatic. A century ago, the scientific threat du jour was mass starvation on a planet unable to grow enough food for its exploding population.

That spectre evaporated in 1914 when German chemists found ways to mass-produce nitrogen, the key ingredient for agricultural fertilisers – and for explosives.

What counts is an obsessive conviction that time is everything

Five years earlier, scientists struggled to produce half a teaspoon of nitrogen-rich liquid per minute. By the time the Great War began, they had boosted production rates by a factor of 10m.

It was a similar story with the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to build the first atomic bombs. In 1941 scientists had less than a millionth of a gram of plutonium to work with. Four years later they had ramped up production 10bn-fold – and used it to end the Second World War. During the Cold War, America went from having no men in space in 1961 to two walking on the moon in eight years flat.

History also shows such breathtaking progress isn't achieved by throwing billions at the task – witness the dismal failures of the 'wars' on cancer and Aids. What counts is an obsessive conviction that time is everything. Only this can cut through the bureaucracy and pettifogging restrictions that throttle grand projects in peacetime.

It demands the mind-set that led Churchill to respond to demands for equipment from