Sixty five Nobel winners were meeting in Mainau, Lake Constance in Southern Germany at their annual conference of Nobel Laureates sponsored by the Lindau Foundation.
Among the donors to the Lindau Nobel initiative are Lockheed Martin, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Bayer, Merck, Novartis and Microsoft.
Climate Change was on the agenda. The venue was largely a science gathering. There was no declaration or scientific debate on broader issues of war and peace. (See the program)
The “Mainau Declaration 2015 on Climate Change” compares the threat of climate change to that of nuclear war in the heyday of the Cold War era.
According to the Nobel Laureates, the threat of nuclear war belongs to a bygone era. Nuclear war is no longer the main threat, its climate change, “a threat of comparable magnitude”.
The threat to humanity prevails but it has taken on a different form:
Nearly 60 years ago, here on Mainau, a similar gathering of Nobel Laureates in science issued a declaration of the dangers inherent in the newly found technology of nuclear weapons—a technology derived from advances in basic science. So far we have avoided nuclear war though the threat remains. We believe that our world today faces another threat of comparable magnitude.