The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore for informing the world about the important issue of human-caused climate change. NSIDC scientists were among the many experts who contributed to the IPCC's efforts.
The Nobel committee recognized the IPCC reports on climate change as significantly contributing to worldwide understanding of this issue. The IPCC reports represent a unique scientific collaboration on a globally important topic; thousands of experts in their scientific fields compiled the reports under the direction of the IPCC.
The reports, released earlier this year, discuss the physical science; impacts, adaptations, and vulnerability; and mitigation of climate change. NSIDC involvement was particularly strong concerning the science behind global warming—the causes, observations, and future projections at the foundation of the discussion.
NSIDC Director Roger Barry served as a Review Editor, and Senior Scientist Tingjun Zhang served as a Lead Author for Chapter 4: Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground. Barry is an Arctic climatologist and has led NSIDC since its founding in 1976. Zhang, a frozen ground and permafrost expert, has been with NSIDC for eleven years.
Contributing authors from NSIDC included scientists Oliver Frauenfeld, Bruce Raup, and Andrew Slater. Additional contributors were NSIDC scientists Richard Armstrong, James McCreight, Walt Meier, Ted Scambos, and Mark Serreze.
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC and to Mr. Gore has given us all a renewed sense of the importance of our work in climate science. We offer our congratulations to the thousands of international experts to whom this honor belongs.
For more information, visit the Nobel Foundation's online summary at https://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/speedread.html.