Political forces are going to keep global warming before us as an issue requiring consideration of changes in how society manages its energy resources. ASME should participate in this debate so that policy decisions that will be made have, to the maximum extent possible, taken into account the technological implications of these decisions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is composed of scientists from academia, government, and industry of numerous countries. The committees look at the evidence for and against the existence of climate change, try to evaluate whether or not there is a human component, assess likely consequences, and review ways to mitigate effects. While there is not much politics in the science, there is, of course, a great deal in the Kyoto Treaty negotiations and discussions around the economics of its implementation, but that is to be expected, since trade and dollars are involved.
Readers can find discussion and documentation online.
I especially appreciate the information on significant developments in the electric motor and transformer industries. Although author Gale Morrison did an excellent job covering the most recent applications, which was the primary purpose of the article, I am writing to clarify a historical oversight that I believe is worth mentioning. Although it is true that the IBM Zurich research team of Karl Muller and Georg Bednorz was the first to discover relatively high T c in oxides, their research contributed only a 30K superconductor. His vision, persistence, and dedication to the development of this far-reaching technology deserves historical recognition. While not wishing to buy into the relative merits of greenhouse gas emission strategies and their timing or cost, I do want to highlight the greater underlying problem of this attitude for the engineering profession.