Piece of Nobel Peace Prize

Former Vice President Al Gore is not the only Tennessean to share in the Nobel Peace Prize 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." A co-winner was the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to which several researchers and a supercomputer at ORNL contributed.

Tom Wilbanks, David Greene, Paul Hanson, Virginia Dale and Gregg Marland contributed to several reports of IPCC's four assessments. Wilbanks was a coordinating lead author of a chapter in the IPCC Fourth Assessment report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerabilities. Greene was a lead author for the "Transport" chapter of the IPCC Fourth Assessment mitigation report. Marland was a lead author of one of the first chapters on land use change and forestry and contributor to chapters for the panel's first three assessments.

Cheetah, the IBM high-performance computing system at the National Center for Computational Sciences, a Department of Energy user facility at ORNL, provided more than one-third of the simulations of Earth's past, present and future climate states for the joint DOE-National Science Foundation contribution to the first report of IPCC's Fourth Assessment, issued in 2007. David Erickson and John Drake were ORNL leaders of IPCC simulations on Cheetah in 2005. In a congratulatory letter to more than 2,000 scientists and policymakers who contributed to the panel's reports, IPPC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri of India wrote: "This makes all of you a Nobel laureate."

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