Panel toiled without fanfare
They toiled for years without pay and widespread recognition.
But yesterday's announcement that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore was more than enough payback for thousands of international scientists, some from the Boston area, who make up the panel's ranks.
"So many have put in endless hours (unpaid!) so this is a very satisfying outcome," Raymond Bradley, a climatologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who was a contributing author on one of the panel's four reports, wrote in an e-mail from Poland. Bradley joked that there was no champagne to celebrate, "but maybe a vodka or two."
The IPCC was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program to conduct periodic assessments of science about manmade global warming. Hundreds of authors and thousands of reviewers from more than 130 countries have compiled four assessments so far.
In the most recent assessment, released this year, the panel said that there was more than 90 percent certainty that humans are the leading cause of the world's temperature rise in the last 50 years, and that the warming has already caused noticeable environmental changes on the planet.
The panel projected that by the end of the century, global temperatures will rise 3.2 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit and sea level will rise 7 to 23 inches and possibly more, depending on how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are emitted.
If emissions are not reined in, the world will have to live with more droughts, heat waves, and severe storms, the panel said.
Yesterday, local scientists who contributed to the IPCC reports said the award makes clear that the world must reduce the emissions of heat-trapping gases or suffer instability and conflict over limited supplies of water and other environmental resources.
"The profound thing is you cannot think of peace and security without thinking of climate change," said Adil Najam, associate professor at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and a lead author of the third and fourth IPCC assessment reports. On his way to a previously planned climate change conference at Fletcher, Najam said there would be some celebrating, but the focus would be on continuing scientific work to understand manmade climate change.
"It doesn't make any of us anything other than mighty happy and somewhat proud," he said.
James McCarthy of Harvard University, who cochaired an IPCC working group looking at impacts of and vulnerabilities to climate change for the 2001 assessment, said he hoped that the prize would propel policy changes in the future.
Beth Daley can be reached by e-mail at bdaley@globe.com.
