KEY POINTS:
Jim Salinger was a 28-year-old student when he came across a curious fact. While trawling through data from weather stations from the Kermadec Islands to the north of New Zealand and the Campbells to the south, he noticed that our part of the world, at least, was warming up.
That was 1975 and it was curious because it flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Suggestions from the Northern Hemisphere, where there had been a run of cold winters, was that the world was moving towards an ice age.
What the young Salinger then in the early stages of PhD studies at Otago University and colleague Jill Gunn found was that temperatures in our region had warmed by half a degree in the past 35 years and a full 1C during the 20th century. The latter was like swapping Auckland's climate for Cape Reinga's.
In a paper for the renowned science magazine Nature, Salinger suggested the ice-age hypothesis was flawed because it was based mainly on data from the Northern Hemisphere, where high concentrations of pollution particles in its atmosphere could mute the impact of the sun. It was a bold assertion for a scientist so young and the ante was upped when it was picked up by the Times in London.
"It was an interesting period," says the understated Salinger. "In those days you talked to meteorological services, where most climate scientists worked, and most took the view that climate change didn't exist."
Years later Salinger was told by colleagues in Britain that it was a watershed paper, prompting many scientists to rethink climate change.
The abstract of the paper, published 31 July, 1975, reads: "Many papers have described the climatic fortunes of areas in the Northern Hemisphere over the past few hundred years; the progressive warming during 1890-1940, and the present deterioration. Some people have suggested the globe could be descending into an ice age, but such assumptions are derived mainly from data for the Northern Hemisphere ... Here we present the results of an examination of a small area in the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere which has been warming over the past 30 years."
Hence the satisfaction Salinger felt when he learned that he shared a small part of the Nobel Peace Prize. "After detecting it in 1975, now I'm delighted and encouraged that the realisation [of global warming] is mainstream and that we need to do something about it."
It's a long way from his weatherman beginnings as a teenager who built his own mini weather station louvred screens, thermometer, rain and wind gauges in his parents' back yard. This is how it starts, he says, for many who make the study of weather and climate their life's work.
The prize was shared by former United States vice-president Al Gore, for his film, The Inconvenient Truth, and by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in recognition of their efforts in raising awareness about the issue.
"I heard about Al Gore. That was a poorly kept secret as he was suddenly cancelling engagements ... then Jim Renwick [Niwa, Wellington] rang and said, 'Did you know we are Nobel Peace Prize laureates?"
The IPCC is a scientific body tasked to evaluate the risk of climate change caused by human activity. It was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme to publish special reports on climate change.
It doesn't monitor climate itself or conduct its own research, but bases its assessments on peer-reviewed and published scientific reports. It has only about a dozen paid staff, relying on the voluntary work of specialists around the world such as Salinger.
About 500 of the IPCC's lead authors are to receive a commemorative certificate acknowledging their contribution to the panel's prize-winning work. New Zealanders are well represented among them.
A dozen Kiwis, including Salinger and, notably, Dr David Wratt, head of Niwa's national climate centre, have been lead authors on IPCC reports, which provide the world with the most credible science on global warming. Many other New Zealand scientists have contributed.
Dr Wratt has been involved in the IPCC since its inception and is currently the only New Zealander on the 40-member IPCC management panel.
Though Gore's movie may have got star billing, it was launched on a platform provided by the work of IPCC scientists.
The IPCC's reports are each about the size of a telephone directory with even the summaries in quite technical language, so the value of Gore's movie was in getting the message across. Despite some issues necessarily being over-simplified and it containing errors, Salinger says its contribution to the public's understanding was huge.
"A British court found there were nine mistakes, but you might say there were 400 facts that were correct, so I'm not quibbling ... it wasn't like The Day After Tomorrow, which was a total Hollywood beat-up."
As for the future? The world has to get cracking and though Salinger puts it politely the likes of the US, China, India have to co-operate. "The IPCC has worked out that by 2050 we have to have [emissions] reductions of 60 to 80 per cent. We don't seem to be on the path of that.
"Everybody has to be involved and developed nations must assist the developing countries with new technologies so they can make a technological leap [allowing development in a less polluting way]. If we don't get on to it urgently, we are going to have a lot of global warming."
Although that might not be too devastating for New Zealand, it will be elsewhere. "Dramatically at risk," says Salinger, are the Arctic areas and the large Asian mega deltas which have millions of people and would be hit by both sea level rises and flooding. Also, arid and semi-arid areas of Africa will get drier, affecting crops and raising the spectre of mass starvation.
Talks aimed at getting world consensus on cutting global greenhouse gas emissions got serious at Kyoto 10 years ago. The latest round concluded in Indonesia earlier this month. The resulting Bali Action Plan contains no binding action in terms of cuts.
The plan concludes that "deep cuts in global emissions" will be required and provides a timetable for two years of talks to shape the first formal addendum to the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change Treaty since Kyoto.
The United States rejected a binding plan for rich countries to cut emissions by 2020 up to 40 per cent below 1990 levels, despite it having made an about turn in attitude by publicly praising the IPCC's work.
The New York Times reported last week that American negotiators had remained obstructive at Bali until changing stance in the final hour of the two-week conference "only after public rebukes that included boos and hisses from other delegates".
The White House, without citing China and India by name, said it had "serious concerns' about limited steps taken by emerging economic powers.
Scientists can be coy about comment that might be construed as political. Ask Salinger about progress in Bali and he responds by quoting author and Guardian columnist George Monbiot: "[The] Bali deal is worse than Kyoto we've been suckered again by the US. America will keep on wrecking climate talks so long as those with vested interests in oil and gas fund its political system."
Monbiot's reading of Kyoto and Bali is that the United States (which produces 25 per cent of world emissions) stalled real progress at each.
At Kyoto, 1997, the European Union requested emission cuts of 15 per cent by 2010. The US led, ironically, by Al Gore drove them down to 5.2 per cent by 2012 and then destroyed the concept of making the cuts at home by demanding that rich countries should be able to buy their cuts from other countries.
"In 1997 and 2007 it got the best of both worlds: it wrecked the treaty and was praised for saving it." Monbiot writes that Gore has been more of a leader since leaving politics and offers two reasons why irrespective of who is at the helm the US behaves as it does on climate change.
One he terms "the corporate media" which downplays the threat of climate change; the other is campaign cash.
"Since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector mostly coal, oil, gas, logging and agribusiness has given US$418 million ($547 million) to US federal politicians. Transport companies have given US$355 ($465 million)."
In his presentation speech, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjos, said that for a long time there had been great doubt about whether global warming was man-made but that, thanks to the IPCC, there was very little such doubt today.
It may be that recognition of the problem was the easy part.
Salinger suggests altruism will be needed. "It's certainly going to test society. Maybe the nature of society needs to change - certainly how we use energy will."
