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鈥淭HE organization shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available.鈥� article of the 鈥淐onvention for the Establishment of a European Organization for Nuclear Research鈥�, signed by 12 countries on 29 September 1954, was a statement of visionary idealism in a world less than a decade on from the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Such admirable principles led to the vast particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, that is now better known as CERN. The model championed by its founders, of peaceable scientific collaboration across borders with results freely available to all, has more than proved its worth. It can be measured not just in the contribution of CERN researchers to our understanding of the building blocks of reality, which culminated in the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, but also the technological spin-offs. Most notable of these was the World Wide Web, developed in the lab by Tim Berners-Lee and released to the world in 1993. Others include medical, computing and imaging technologies that have benefited humanity as a whole.

鈥淛ust imagine a similar international research institution dedicated to climate change鈥�

CERN鈥檚 boss Fabiola Gianotti is right to be proud of the spirit of common human purpose her organisation embodies (see 鈥淐ERN boss: Big physics may be in a funk, but we need it more than ever鈥�). Its work relies on combining expertise from across theoretical and experimental science, technology and engineering to solve cutting-edge challenges. As Gianotti points out, that often involves cooperation between scientists from countries whose leaders refuse to sit down and talk to each other.

Is it dewy-eyed idealism to suggest that this is a model we might apply elsewhere? Just imagine an international research institution dedicated to climate change bringing together, physically and in virtual spaces, the best minds from climate science, energy technology, economics, social science and beyond. More than ever, we need global scientific leadership in finding solutions to this existential challenge. CERN鈥檚 motto is 鈥渁ccelerating science鈥�: there is no area of science we need to put a rocket under more right now than climate change.