About

RDD
RDD

I have been an industrial scientist and developer, teacher and manager after doing degrees in physics several decades ago. Over the last 25 years I have expanded my knowledge of biochemistry and human physiology. On the humanities I have read in music, philosophy, history, economics and social science. I have been playing a wide repertoire of piano music for 70 years. I have had success in many things I have done and found good friends among my clients, colleagues and students. I have made many mistakes too.

Sometime in the 1950s I thought that at some point in the future (I did realise a long way off) that the burning of all the stored coal and oil might deplete oxygen so much as to make our kind of life impossible. I didn’t realise then that the CO2 would be the main problem even in double its then minute quantity. I read the ‘Club of Rome’ report ‘Limits to Growth’ in 1972. This made the issue of environmental limits something I started tracking in reports and books and I thought the criticism of the ‘Limits to Growth’ missed the point that particular details may be wrong but the there really are limits. So for some years I have worried about global warming and found that until recently most people thought that I had silly ideas when I raised it.

The other matter that I pondered in the 1950s was the reason that the powerful made decisions on behalf of ‘the people’. Was it for selfish petty reasons or for real considerations of the common good; my assessment of this has become more negative over the decades.