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News Release

October 12, 2007

Contact:

Mark Shwartz, Woods Institute for the Environment: (650) 723-9296, mshwartz@stanford.edu


Stanford researchers who worked with climate-change panel join Al Gore at Nobel press conference

By Mark Shwartz

Six Stanford University researchers have played a prominent role with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific organization that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

In announcing the prize today, Oct. 12, the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo praised the IPPC and Gore "for 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."

Since its founding in 1988 in Geneva, Switzerland, the IPCC has published a series of scientific reports that have "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming," according to the Norwegian committee's citation. The following Stanford researchers are lead authors of several major IPCC climate reports:

  • Chris Field, professor of biological sciences and director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford;
  • Thomas Heller, the Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies and senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies;
  • Michael Mastrandrea, research associate at the Woods Institute and lecturer in Stanford's School of Earth Sciences;
  • Terry Root, senior fellow at the Woods Institute;
  • Stephen Schneider, the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies and senior fellow at the Woods Institute;
  • John Weyant, professor (research) of management science and engineering.

    • Field, Heller, Root and Schneider have joined Gore at a press conference today in Palo Alto.

    About 2,000 scientists from more than 100 countries have participated in the IPCC since 1988. "By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world's future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind," the prize committee said. "Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man's control."

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