Emerging threatsBlitz spirit needed to meet challenges like climate change: Dr. Hugh Hunt

Today’s engineers will need the kind of drive and determination shown by the great wartime innovators such as Sir Barnes Wallis and Sir Frank Whittle if they are to respond effectively to challenges such as climate change, University of Cambridge Reader in Engineering Dr. Hugh Hunt told the Royal Academy of Engineering on Tuesday, 3 November.

Giving the Academy’s Autumn Lecture, Dr. Hunt compared today’s challenge of adapting to future climate change with the imperative to develop new technologies to tip the balance of military capability in favor of the Allies during the Second World War. Necessity fueled many technological developments during the 1939-45 period which decisively influenced the course of the Second World War, including radar, the Enigma machine, and the jet engine.

The Royal Academy of Engineers notes that it is the sheer scope of Barnes Wallis’s lateral thinking in developing the bouncing bomb that fascinates Dr. Hunt and epitomizes the approach he thinks is now required from modern engineers in responding to climate change. Despite Bomber Command’s belief in the effectiveness of area bombing, Wallis saw it as a very blunt instrument and managed to persuade “Bomber” Arthur Harris to consider his idea of blowing up key German dams in order to cripple the steel industry.

“Barnes Wallis responded to the emergency of his time with extreme lateral thinking,” says Dr. Hunt, “and we need that mentality again now if we are to move towards low carbon energy and provide clean water and food for the world’s population. These are the great challenges of our time and we need to look at much bolder solutions, like designing structures to have multiple functions.

“Flood defenses are a great example of where this might help — you can use them to generate tidal power when they are not needed to prevent flooding. Perhaps such a scheme at the mouth of the River Parrott could be used both to generate power and to protect the Somerset Levels from flooding.

“Personally, I think we may actually be too late to mitigate the worst effects of climate change and that we also need to be looking at truly radical geoengineering schemes like re-freezing the polar ice caps. The fact that it sounds completely mad would not have put Barnes Wallis off, and we need more of his kind of unrestrained imagination coupled with technological genius.”

Winner of the Academy’s 2015 Rooke Award for public engagement, Dr. Hunt won the Royal Television Society’s Best History Documentary for Dambusters: Building the Bouncing Bomb, which has been seen by millions around the world. He has also made documentaries on the Great Escape, D-Day, and zeppelins.