Geoff Levermore Nobel Prize winner

In classic academic uniform of corduroy trousers, crew-neck sweater and comfy shoes, Geoff Levermore may lack the swagger and statesmanship of former US vice-president Al Gore, but he lacks none of Gore’s courage when it comes to tackling governments and institutions on how best to confront the problem of climate change.

An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s film plea for action to protect the environment, helped the politician to win the 2007 Nobel Prize. He shared the award with the cast of thousands of experts and scientists that have contributed to the United Nations’ Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Among those thousands is Levermore, professor of the built environment at the University of Manchester and vice-chairman of CIBSE northwest region. For the record, he hasn’t met Gore. And only the “upper echelons” of the IPCC attended the Nobel ceremony in Oslo. But he has seen Gore’s film: “I admit to being pleasantly surprised. Here was a politician that appeared really to believe what he was saying.”

Levermore helped to write the IPCC report Mitigation of Climate Change, specifically chapter 6 on the part to be played by buildings. A key conclusion was that CO2 emissions from energy use in buildings could be substantially cut by using existing mature technologies such as condensing boilers and low-energy lighting. However, more financial and social incentives are needed from governments and industry to increase their use.

The professor emits quiet passion when discussing the human aspects of what building services could achieve. “It’s a wonderful time to be an engineer because they more or less have command of modern building regulations and are having to see what the performance of the building is going to be in terms of energy use and carbon emissions.”

But there is a big problem: engineering’s voice simply is not being heard, according to Levermore. Even the Institution of Civil Engineers doesn’t get much one-on-one time with the prime minister. Levermore believes that some realignment of engineering organisations is needed if the profession is to have significant impact on government and also on clients and education. Too many of the institutions are talking up their own corner at the expense of the bigger picture, he feels.

“I would like to see CIBSE merge with another engineering institute. Separately the institutions are weak because they are fragmented. If they all got together we’d have a lot more clout. The mechanical and electricals are thinking of merging. Years ago there was talk of CIBSE merging with the Institute of Energy. That would have been quite a nice merger.”

It could help to stop science losing out in education, Levermore says, at a time when the UK is churning out more people with MBAs in management but increasingly with nothing to manage. “CIBSE, along with the other engineering institutes, has got to push the government to support engineering in education because engineering could die out in this country. Universities are much more cost-oriented now. So if, for instance, media studies will bring in more students, then that’s the way the universities will go.”

Levermore, 58, read physics at Imperial College London before beginning his career with the GEC Hirst Research Centre in 1975. For his PhD he studied the Johnsen-Rahbek effect, used in Thomas Edison’s “loud-speaking telephone” in the 1870s. He joined the GEC Hirst centre intending to work on dielectrics, studying substances with poor conductivity. Instead, he was put in the lighting lab. “I said, that’s OK but I know nothing about lighting. They said, ‘You’re going to find out.’ ”

I would like CIBSE to merge with another institute. Separately the institutions are weak because they are fragmented. Together they'd have a lot more clout.

While researching high-pressure sodium lighting and mercury lamps, he also completed a management diploma which included behavioural studies. Part of his work concerned workers’ claims that one type of lighting was better than another, and helped to improve their productivity. Levermore suspected it was a case of the Hawthorne effect, also known as “somebody upstairs cares” syndrome.

The name comes from a Chicago factory called the Hawthorne Works where tests in the 1920s and 30s studied the impact on staff productivity of changing the physical environment. The final analysis suggested that the simple act of taking an interest in people could improve their productivity.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli war had given Levermore the first inklings of an energy-conscious future. A move to London’s Wandsworth council in 1979 allowed him to consider energy saving in a practical way. “As energy manager I had to start a team that was self-financing, meaning we had to at least equal our own salaries in energy savings.”

One project concerned the council’s nine children’s homes. In seven of the homes the staff were told that energy use was to be monitored. Improvements were made, including upgraded heating systems and insulation. The other two were left untouched. Building improvements alone could not account for the big electricity savings made in the monitored homes, Levermore says. The Hawthorne effect may have played a part. As soon as staff understood that they were being observed, he says, they became energy-conscious and turned off lights and appliances when not needed.

“What I learnt was just how important people are in the energy-conservation equation. My eyes were opening to the human factor in building services, a very important aspect of the profession. Are we producing building services the people really want? That’s a question we rarely ask ourselves and often it’s a brave consultant that does so.”

More energy studies followed after he became an academic at South Bank Polytechnic in London. While conducting research at the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in 2004, he learnt that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was seeking people to work on the IPCC project. Levermore was chosen as the UK-nominated expert, joining nine other lead authors in a multinational team to put together chapter 6 on residential and commercial buildings.

Globally, a third of pollution is said to come from buildings and in the UK it’s about 40-50%. This emphasises the importance of building services as a mitigator of climate change.

“Did you know that one-third of the world doesn’t have electricity?” Levermore says. “While we worry about how much glare we get off our new PC screen, the rest of the world is still reading by kerosene lamp. Kerosene is 100 times less efficient than tungsten lamp and an LED is five times more efficient than tungsten. But with a little technology you can have photovoltaic cells charging batteries that in turn run LEDs. This could do away with kerosene lamps. Also, because of poor cooking stoves in some parts of the world, a lot of women go blind from indoor air pollution and there is a high instance of childhood deaths from soot.”

Levermore gives much credit for the IPCC work on buildings to Mark Levine, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in San Francisco. The USA gets bad press when it comes to climate change, but Levermore points out that it does more research and development on building services that any other country. “Don't judge America by George W Bush. It’s just unfortunate that he has a lot of power right now.”