Last year’s Nobel Peace prize went to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri is the Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.   He is also the Director General of the Energy and Resources Institute in India.

Over the last two decades, the IPCC has drawn attention to the connection between human activities and global warming.  Thousands of scientists and officials representing hundreds of countries have come together under the umbrella of the IPCC to release assessment reports on climate change.  

The most recent of these reports, released last year, found that the “warming of the climate is unequivocal” and that the probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%.

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri was in Chicago recently as a guest of the Environmental Law and Policy Center. While he was here Pachauri spoke with policy makers about the urgency of addressing global warming in the Midwest.  I caught up with him at the Environmental Law and Environmental Law and Environmental Law and Environmental Law and Environmental Law and Policy Center‘s downtown offices.

Dr. Pachauri explains what he thinks are the most urgent effect of climate change.