Berkeley climate researcher Inez Fung doesn't really like politics. She's a scientist . But over her distinguished career, she has regularly waded into political battles, like when she contributed to the IPCC work that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 and advised Massachusetts during its successful suit to force the EPA to count CO2 as pollution.
Next week, rather than go to Copenhagen, she will attend the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) annual conference, one of the biggest collection of Earth scientists in the world. Change.org spoke to her on Friday as she hurried to prepare.
Q: So what are you hoping for from the Copenhagen conference?
Inez Fung: What I'm hoping for I don't think will happen. I'm hoping for drastic reduction in emissions and I do not see that in the cards. So now what I'm hoping for is that they give a sense of urgency. To pretend we can do two degrees [conservative estimate for temperature rise] is a pretense. The greenhouse gases that are in the atmosphere have already committed us to over two degrees. The reason [temperatures have not risen] over two degrees is that we are counting on aerosols to offset. But aerosols are bad guys. They are pollution.
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