Eight LAS scientists share in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, recently awarded to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as to former vice president Al Gore.
The IPCC was formed in 1988 with the task of probing the science of climate change. "For the University of Illinois to have eight scientists highly involved on the IPCC is really quite significant," says Don Wuebbles, one of the professors active on the panel.
In addition to Wuebbles, the IPCC includes four other LAS professors-Natalia Andronova, Atul Jain, Michael Schlesinger, and John Walsh-and three research scientists-Katharine Hayhoe, Ken Patten, and William Chapman. All eight scientists from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences have played leadership roles and were contributing authors to IPCC reports.
For instance, Wuebbles and Walsh have both served as lead authors on chapters in several of the IPCC's four major assessments, while Jain and Schlesinger have been lead authors on specialized reports. The IPCC just released its fourth major assessment this year.
According to Wuebbles, the Nobel Peace Prize further highlights the overwhelming consensus among scientists that global climate change is a real problem.
"Among scientists, there is little disagreement about whether global warming is occurring," he says. "The real debate is about what we should do about it."
Some people have questioned whether an issue like global warming qualifies for a prize focusing on peace, Wuebbles also says. But as he points out, the issue has a major impact on the policies and interactions of nations all across the globe.
In tackling this issue, he says, the IPCC is "very much deserving of the Peace Prize."
As the Nobel committee put it, "Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. Thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming."
