Eight Rutgers researchers are among the participants in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which will share the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore for their efforts to raise awareness and to lay the foundations for measures needed to counteract global warming.
The Rutgers faculty members who contributed to the work of the IPCC are from several scientific disciplines and three schools. They include Richard Anyah, research associate in the Center for Environmental Prediction (CEP); Anthony Broccoli, acting director of the CEP and associate professor of environmental science; Alan Robock, professor of environmental science; Georgiy Stenchikov, research professor of environmental science; Paul Falkowski, professor of geological and marine science and director of the Rutgers Energy Institute; Jennifer Francis, research professor of marine science; David Robinson, professor of geography and New Jersey State Climatologist; and Monica Mazurek, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering.
“It felt fabulous,” said Robock, a contributing author of eight chapters of various IPCC reports, and a reviewer of several more, going back to 1992. Although Gore’s win did not come as surprise, Robock said he was “completely astounded” when he learned that IPCC won. “The award was for the science and for the publicity about the science," he said. “And it is a clear statement that climate change is an important security issue.”
The climate panel, established in 1988, is comprised of more than 2,000 scientists from 130 nations. The Nobel Prize committee cited the IPCC for 20 years of scientific reports that have focused attention on the relationship between human activities and global warming.
The panel’s work is divided among four working groups. Working Group I assesses the scientific aspects of the climate system and climate change. Working Group II concentrates on the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change. Working Group III works on the mitigation of the negative effects of climate change. Finally, the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories is responsible for reaching international agreement among scientists about how to calculate the greenhouse emissions of each country.
Contributing authors are scientists who have written a chapter for one of the IPCC reports, usually called “assessments.” Such chapters are reviewed by other scientists in a process similar to the peer review that scientific journals use.
Broccoli, like Robock, has been an author and a reviewer. His writing contributions included some work on the cold ocean-warm land pattern, a pattern in which the oceans get colder as the continents in the northern hemisphere get warmer.