the information sifted on its clifftop has dramatic implications for our planet. The wind analysed in Cainey's flasks - "like fat glass sausages" - is judged the purest in the world, enabling her to monitor global levels of pollution.

This April I had a conversation with Cainey (right) that I count as one of the most significant I can recall. I'd last spoken to her five years ago, when she was not at liberty to make a statement on climate change, Australia not having signed the Kyoto Protocol (it did so this year). But she did tell me that concentrations of carbon dioxide had risen from 330 parts per million in 1983 to 372ppm in 2003. The danger level, she said then, was 400.

When I contacted her again on April 23, 2008, she told me the CO2 level had since risen a further ten parts to 382ppm. And she's no longer inhibited in what she

says.

The climate change that we experience today is the result, explains Cainey, of carbon dioxide emissions from 30 years ago. The most recent measurement of these emissions taken at Cape Grim shows that we haven't modified our behaviour, quite the opposite.

Australia is particularly interesting for scientists like Cainey because the results of climate change are manifest. A few miles along the coast from Cape Grim, sea-level rises have caused tracts of land to become saline, no longer productive. The impact of the melting ice cap is not the only phenomenon that concerns Cainey. "We don't know how plankton will respond when the ocean desalinifies; how trees and forests are going to respond, how crops."

One example: the oceans are becoming more acidic, which means that plankton production is