Well, my first job after getting my Ph.D. was at the University of Essex, and I worked there for many years on the effect of temperature on plants, particularly the mechanism by which temperature affects photosynthesis. And then, getting into this paper, one of the people I corresponded with in the States was Burt Drake, who worked at the Smithsonian in the same area but had become interested in the effects of rising carbon dioxide on plants. In 1989, I spent a sabbatical with him and that got me into thinking about carbon dioxide as well as temperature. And then the paper was really more about trying to make a point. At that time in global change research, most of the predictions were based on the effect of temperature alone on plants. And what they seemed to ignore was the interaction between temperature and carbon dioxide, because carbon dioxide, of course, is a substrate for plants. If the temperature rise is caused by rising carbon dioxide, then the plants will respond to both these changes. And it was already known from theory that carbon dioxide and temperature should interact in this way. Most of the theory behind that paper was already in the literature. The key work was the work of Farquhar, Von Caemmerer, and Berry, which had been done in 1982. So I was really using their theory to then explain how carbon dioxide would strongly affect the way plants responded to rising temperature. Essentially I was using their theory to simulate what would happen and to make the point that people had to take this response to carbon dioxide into effect in their simulations as well as the plant's response to temperature.

  What made you decide to submit it to Plant Cell and Environment?

At the time, what I was proposing was really going against a lot of what had already been written on the subject. But Plant Cell and Environment had a reputation for publishing novel work, work that might not have everybody's approval, so that's why I submitted it there. That was the first journal I tried. I knew that some researchers would be opposed to the idea, and I wanted to send it somewhere that would be willing to publish something fresh.

  Were you surprised at the paper's impact?

Yes. I expected that it would cause some discussion and maybe some rethinking. But I never really thought it would be quite as highly cited as it has been.

  How did the community respond to it?

Well, I think this carbon dioxide-temperature interaction is now incorporated in many of the global change models. In hindsight, the long-term response has been positive in that many people have used it. It encouraged people to look at the interaction between temperature and elevated carbon dioxide, and the field has moved a long way since then. We have conducted work ourselves that has refined our understanding of this response, and the interaction between temperature and rising carbon dioxide, and many other groups have taken that much further.

  Were there any serendipitous factors that made this paper happen?

Probably just spending that sabbatical period with Burt Drake. He was very influential on my thinking. I had the background in temperature. And he got me working with carbon dioxide as well, and that made me start thinking about the interaction between the two.

  What would you say is the biggest challenge right now in your research?

Certainly one of the biggest challenges is to gain more certainty about how plants and ecosystems are going to respond in the long term to elevated carbon dioxide and elevated temperature. We know a lot about the short term, and we, of course, have models of the longer term, but we really need experiments that are going to give us definitive answers.

  So how do you go about doing that?

Well, that’s something we have been grappling with. There have been experiments, for example, with elevated carbon dioxide—the Free-Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment experiment, for one, abbreviated as FACE. These are large field experiments with elevated carbon dioxide that try to look at how systems respond. One of the challenges now is to combine that technology with warming in the field. And people have tried various methods; for example, warming the soil. We're looking at the possibility of actually warming by free release of the heat. It is fairly expensive in terms of electricity use, but if we're really going to obtain answers about how these systems will respond, we need these field experiments to back up our models. There seems to be no other way to do it.

  Are you satisfied with the pace of your research and how far you’ve come in the past decade?

In a sense it's impossible to be satisfied with the pace of research. Especially when, as in this particular case, we are looking at a change which is actually happening in the environment now. Certainly rising carbon dioxide is now evident and the temperature is beginning to increase. We're acutely aware of the fact that we have to get answers quickly, but we need to be getting the correct answers. Our biggest frustration is that despite all the research in this area, and despite the importance of global change, this research is not actually higher on the national agendas than it is.

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