Only the faintest lingering of Dr Tom Gernon’s Dundalk accent remains. He is softly-spoken and possesses the rare ability to parse complicated matters in colloquial terms.  The millennium winner of the Young Scientist competition, Gernon is now a Professor of Earth and Climate Science at the University of Southampton, a member of the prestigious Turing Institute, and the founder of the Earth Intelligence Laboratory.  He has built a reputation for investigating and answering questions that meet at a pinprick inflection point between commerce, science, and public interest.  And for the past two decades, the question that has hounded Gernon has been…