Give me data and I’ll change your world.
Such claims are commonplace in the world of business, governance, healthcare, elections—any walk of life you may think of. The catch words remind us of late John Martin’s ‘Give me half a tanker of iron and I’ll give you an ice age’. One of the catchiest lines ever spoken by an oceanographer, Martin’s idea of iron fertilisation of oceans, to trigger plankton blooms that would act as carbon sinks, became popular through the 1990s when global warming was becoming evident.