HE HAS never met the former US vice-president turned environmental campaigner Al Gore. But Professor Martin Price was one of an international team of scientists that shared the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Gore for alerting the world to the importance of climate change.
Price, director of the centre for mountain studies at Perth College, was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that established the scientific evidence that underpins the film An Inconvenient Truth.
The Nobel Committee s
aid the prize was awarded to Gore and the IPCC: "for efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change."
It is, acknowledges Price, a highly political subject. "Most science is political anyway – it is just that most scientists don't want to recognise it," he says.
The professor is now steering a £1.5m EU project to examine how mountain communities can adapt to climate change.
Since he first began working on the subject he has seen a transformation – from climate change being an issue for a small group of scientists – to an issue that governments, industry and individuals around the world can no longer ignore.
Price believes that Gore did a good job of summarising the scientific arguments. "I thought it was a very good film," he says. "The evidence he presented would be accepted by the majority of climate change scientists around the world but it was done at a level that most can understand.
"The Nobel Prize was awarded because if we understand issues seriously it is less likely to lead to global conflict."
Research into increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere began with Charles Keeling in 1957. Keeling's work found that a huge rise in was taking place in the atmosphere. Later, scientists, including Stephen Schneider, who Price worked with in the US, argued that the increased amounts of trapped in the atmosphere was partly due to pollution and were having a significant effect on global temperatures and weather conditions.
Price became interested in the subject, while doing his PhD in the US.
"My focus had always been mountains, but to fund my doctorate I had to find extra jobs," he explains. "The Denver Museum of Natural History planned an exhibition about climate change and they needed a scientific advisor. At that time I didn't know anything about climate change."
Price became fascinated by the subject – but political pressures made it difficult to find funding for research.
"When Reagan came in he wasn't interested, and all the funding dried up. Had Reagan not come to power when he did we would be further along now in our knowledge and understanding."
Later, he was invited to carry out a study for the US National Science Foundation about how climate change might affect people. He was one of the first to study what steps could be taken to adapt to changes in climate – which led to him becoming a part of the IPCC. The idea was to create a worldwide coalition of scientists to create an objective survey of climate change.
"For the second UN report I was invited to write a synthesis of our understanding of how climate change can affect people, tourism, agriculture and the economy," he says. "There are lots of people who like to do very detailed scientific research – but my interest has always been in how to pull all these things together."
This approach will be crucial to the professor's next project – to advise mountain communities in Scotland and Scandinavia on their response to global warming. The centre for mountain studies has just received an EU grant of £1.5m for the project that emphasises practical solutions.
"One example would be the Cairngorm mountains," Price explains. "Until last year they have been experiencing a decrease in the number of days of snow."
A possible way to extend tourism in the Cairngorms, he suggests, would be to use the funicular railway during the summer to transport tourists to a centre designed to illustrate climate change.
"You could use it as a focus for explaining why this is a fragile environment," he says.
Having spent most of his working life studying the effects of climate change the Professor is still optimistic about the potential for humans to adapt:
"I am not too worried about the average increases in temperature or changes in rain fall. I think the big risk and the big challenge will be more high winds, more floods and more hurricanes, as well as sea surges as you get the sea levels rising."
The professor has made changes to his own lifestyle, cycling to work whenever possible and offsetting his carbon use.
But he thinks there is more to be done: "I think among the scientific community there is a willingness to do things but no matter how many kilograms of reports we churn out, the crucial thing is to persuade politicians to make changes." When changes would make an impact on people's lifestyles – such as increasing petrol cost – Price says there is reluctance to act.
"We have to be more flexible, think outside the box. We need better co-operation between government agencies at all levels from local to national."
And as always, he believes there is a need to focus on the bigger picture: "Climate change is not the only driver of change in the world, you also have to look at globalisation, Europeanisation and the growth of consumerism. To focus only on climate change would be a mistake – you have to look at all these changes and try to understand how they link together."
The full article contains 942 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
