BERKELEY, CA -- Eight scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were important contributors to the research on global climate change that has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
The 2007 Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and to former Vice President Al Gore, Jr., "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."
William Collins, Inez Fung, and Norman Miller of the Earth Sciences Division (ESD), and Mark Levine, Evan Mills, Lynn Price, Jayant Sathaye, and Ernst Worrell of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) are among the current Lab members who contributed to the IPCC's working group reports. EETD researchers Stephane de la Rue du Can and Aleksandra Novikova also aided the analyses.
Collins and Fung, who are also professors in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California at Berkeley, were among the authors of the report from IPCC Working Group I, "The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change," for the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) in 2007. Miller similarly contributed to the scientific basis of the Third Assessment Report (AR3) in 2001. All three are members of Berkeley Lab's new Climate Science Department in ESD, headed by Collins, which is developing a powerful Integrated Earth System Model to deliver detailed climate predictions on the regional scale more than 20 years out, and global models that can forecast worldwide changes to the end of the century.
Levine, Price, Sathaye, and Worrell were among the authors of the AR4 report from Working Group III, "Mitigation of Climate Change"; Mills and others worked on AR3. Levine, former director of EETD, has long studied problems of climate change and global warming with particular attention to energy use in China. He and Price, Sathaye, Worrell, and Mills are members of EETD's Energy Analysis Department, which among its other research projects develops models of energy use, assesses technological applications, and develops and evaluates policies and programs to improve energy management.
The Chairman of the IPCC, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, sent a letter to the lead authors of this year's reports, remarking, "I have been stunned in a pleasant way with the news of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for the IPCC.... The fact that the IPCC has earned the recognition that this award embodies, is really a tribute to your knowledge, hard work and application."
Berkeley Lab's contributors are among the thousands of scientists from more than 100 countries who have helped the IPCC alert the world to the reality of humanity's role in global warming through increasingly accurate scientific reports issued since the IPCC's founding by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program in 1988.
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit our website at http://www.lbl.gov.