There was already a strong indication of global warming and in fact, George [Porter] brought his own work on atmospheric chemistry to help explain the depletion of the ozone hole. That was discovered by the British Antarctic Survey, but most people don't distinguish between the depletion of the ozone and global warming, they are two quite separate phenomena. And in fact, George Porter had been involved in getting CFCs carbon... chlorine fluorocarbons... CFCs, what does that stand for? Chlorofluorocarbons, the things they use in propellants, in refrigerators and things like that... some of his photochemistry had explained that. So at the time when I joined we were discussing the evidence for global warming, and I became particularly interested in this, and at the Royal Society, we produced a pamphlet suitably published in a green cover, called The Greenhouse Effect. And what this was argued was that purely on a physical basis if you have gasses like CO2 and methane producing, they reduce the amount of heat that gets dissipated from the earth, and you get... the same energy from the sun keeps falling in, so later on I took to saying the physics is incontrovertible and I think it is. The question is this: there are of course long periods during... which the climate has changed, but by then there was already evidence that the climate was changing much more rapidly than had ever happened before. So we produced this pamphlet on the greenhouse effect. I had a hand in making the corrections, amendations to it, but the... and it was the... and it argued that this would affect, we didn't know how much the man-made contribution was, but clearly from the production of the amount of carbon dioxide, it must be quite serious. And this woke up people to... so-called climatologists, to start calculating and planning, trying to calculate these things. But a long of things weren't named, for example what sinks there were in the deep oceans for carbon dioxide. Many people argue that the carbon dioxide... but already the other sinks for carbon dioxide of course are green trees, green plants and trees. But the trees are being cut down at a great rate in Brazil and Indonesia and places like that, so it was... so this was useful document and through the Royal Society and George Porter, it eventually led to the... setting up of the Inter-Governmental... Panel to study climate change, IGPCC, and that had Americans on it and so on. A lot of these was poo-hooed at first, particularly by the Americans and a figure in all this, who appears later, was a man called FO Seitz who wrote the standard work on solid state physics, I knew his work very well. Distinguished physicist who had been President of the National Academy of the US, which is a very powerful position, and later became Head of the Energy Institute which is a lobby in the United States which is saying that man-made pollution is negligible and that there's no problems, no crisis, so a formidable enemy, a formidable opponent, I don’t mean formidable opponent.
