Mario Molina | The Science of Climate Change | Davos 2015

Lesson 1Curiosity begins in childhood

I was fascinated with science since I was a boy nine ten years old and I was about eleven twelve years old at most part of the reason is my studies were in chemical engineering actually because physical chemistry was not well established in mexico at that time and so I realized I would have a better chance to sort of widen my my studies in the United States and that turned out to be the case I certainly learned a lot in germany but the american system is more flexible

Lesson 2Learning to ask scientific questions

my Ph.D. I did with George Pimentel who was a wonderful mentor I was just doing basic science at that time and then with with Sherry Roland I started to work after finishing my Ph.D. we were both doing fundamental science and we both decided let's do something more applied say atmospheric chemistry how do we go about it let's find the problem some interesting problem that would teach us about the atmosphere and that's how we chose this question what happens to these industrial compounds that are accumulating in the atmosphere

Lesson 3When research serves society

what started out as a curiosity question what happens to these compounds ended up with an environmental issue we were not environmentalist at that time Sherry and myself and the industry thought well this is just speculation we're not going to change our manufacture of these chemicals just based on theory and so on and we sort of agreed that we had a hypothesis at that time and that we had to work with the scientific community to better establish it and that's what happened some of that science was in fact funded by industry