16 January 2008Olive Heffernan
Since being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with former US vice president Al Gore for their work on climate change, the IPCC has become something of a household name. Its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, or 'Patchy' as he is known to friends, has come as close to celebrity as is possible in science. With the recognition come constant requests — not least for interviews from pushy journalists, I imagine.
We meet in the lobby of the palatial Aston Bali Resort and Spa, where during our brief meeting he is stopped and congratulated by virtually every passer-by. He humbly reminds his admirers that the winning work was that of the many hundreds of scientists who make up the UN body on climate change.
I query whether he ever tires of the praise, but he admits that he's a sucker for it — and says it's unlikely to last longer than a few weeks anyhow. If anything, he seems to take from it a renewed vigour for communicating the urgency of global warming, a task at which he is certainly adept.
The IPCC has been assessing the status of climate change for nearly 20 years. This November it issued a synthesis report, the result of almost two years' work, that serves as a primer on the scientific understanding of climate change.
The synthesis is not merely a summary of the three latest reports released by the panel in the first half of 2007, which respectively describe in detail the science of climate change, its impacts, and options for dealing with it. In addition, the neat 23-page briefing clearly sets out the consequences of various courses of action. The IPCC presentation at the plenary session in Bali brought that work formally into the UN negotiating process.
Notably, at this round of UN talks on climate change, the thirteenth conference of its type, no one is questioning the science. A few lonely-looking sceptics can be seen outside handing out flyers and openly admitting, "We're the least popular people here."
Pachauri believes that the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize has convinced people of the magnitude of the issue. "It brings home that climate change is an issue that affects the future of humanity and a dimension that people haven't really thought about previously — if we don't deal with this in time, it could become an issue of peace and national security," he says.
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0802/full/climate.2007.79.html
