20 November 2021 | New Scientist | 5The leader
“THE world has entered a phase of
spectacular technological advances.” So
The New Scientist wrote on 22 November
1956 when introducing its mission.
Nuclear bombs had fallen on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki a little over a decade before,
the digital computer was in its infancy
and the space race was just beginning.
The desire to “publish news of scientific
progress in language as free as possible
from technicalities” was the spur of this
magazine’s foundation, but right from
the outset we were clear about the need
to look further. “For a branch of research
which, today, appears as a purely abstract
quest for knowledge, may turn out
tomorrow to have a direct and vital
application to the happiness of us all,”
we wrote. “Besides, science is exciting;
science can be entertaining.”These sentiments remain as fresh and
true today, and as much a part of our
mission statement, as they were 65 years
ago. It is in that spirit that we have brought
together 13 great “why?” questions about
the cosmos and ourselves in this issue,
questions that excite and entertain,and take us to the very edge of our
understanding (see page 36).
One subject was conspicuously
absent from our first issue, perhaps
understandably so. It wasn’t until two
years later, in 1958, that Charles Keeling
began the measurements at the Mauna
Loa Observatory in Hawaii that firstalerted the world to rising levels of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere. The growing
awareness of the catastrophic effects on
people and the planet of many of those
spectacular technological advances – and
in recent decades our consistent failure
to do anything about it – has been a
feature of this magazine’s existence.
Whether the COP26 climate conference
that ended last week in Glasgow, UK,
represents a turning point remains to
be seen (see pages 8, 9 and 10). Climate
change and wider issues surrounding
our environmental impact aren’t
going to go away. Fulfilling our mission
statement from that first issue, we
will continue to report on them in the
coming decades, as well as on all aspects
of science and its impact on society,
“conscientiously – and readably”. ❚The climate age
As New Scientist turns 65, one issue will and must dominate our next decades
“Climate change and issues
about our environmental impact
aren’t going to go away”Chief executive Nina Wright
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