WWF Praises Al Gore For Nobel Peace Prize
October 14, 2007
The CEO of World Wildlife Fund, the world’s largest environmental organization, said today that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes that climate change is one of the great destabilizing forces of our era and a root cause of some of the world’s most violent conflicts.
“Climate change isn’t just about the environment — it’s about people’s livelihoods. The debate about whether humans are changing the climate is over. We must act with urgency to reduce emissions and stabilize the atmosphere because of the profound connection between climate change and political stability around the world,” said WWF President and CEO Carter Roberts.
“Climate change creates natural catastrophes, disrupts weather patterns and undermines the natural resources upon which people depend around the world. Fixing this problem remains one of the fundamental challenges in achieving sustainable livelihoods, and ultimately peace,” Roberts added. “Throughout his distinguished career, Al Gore has been a leader in bringing attention to the environmental challenges facing our world. WWF congratulates him and the members of the IPCC for this well-deserved honor.”
Many of the world’s most violent and longstanding conflicts have been the result of battles over natural resources. The continuing crisis in Darfur, for example, began in the 1980s as a dispute over water, and chronic water shortages now afflict virtually the entire Horn of Africa, where the UN estimates that more than 20 million people are at risk of starvation.
“Today we are risking irreversible changes to the very systems that sustain both natural environments and humans unless we alter our current patterns of energy use and slow and eventually stop deforestation,” said WWF Climate Director Richard Moss, who also chairs an IPCC task group. “This award recognizes the seminal contribution of the IPCC in assessing climate science for policy makers. Al Gore has built on this record of accomplishment and helped the world understand what will be needed to confront the climate challenge.”
Source: WWF
Gerhard Ertl Wins Nobel Chemistry Prize
October 11, 2007
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honors Professor Ertl for his groundbreaking studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces.
He is credited with creating a methodology for demonstrating how different experimental procedures can be used to provide a complete picture of a surface reaction, observing how individual layers of atoms behave on the extremely pure surface of a metal.
Professor Gunnar von Heijne of the Academy of Sciences explains the importance of Ertl’s work.
“From high school we tend to think of chemical processes as happening in water or perhaps in a gas, but in fact a whole lot of scientifically very interesting and practically important chemistry happens on solid surfaces,” he noted. “Think of iron rust, think of catalytic converters on the exhaust pipes of our cars, think of technologies such as fuel cells. Gedrhard Ertl’s scientific insights have laid a firm foundation for modern surface chemistry, and his careful methodological approach has become a model for both academic research and for industrial process development.”
Nobel science prizes are given for contributions to basic understanding of nature, but Professor Ertl’s work also has practical environmental applications. He has studied the process by which nitrogen can be extracted from air for inclusion in artificial fertilizers, a field of huge importance in agriculture. He has also explained oxidation of carbon monoxide on platinum, a reaction that takes place in catalytic converters to clean auto-exhaust emissions.
Professor Ertl was reached by telephone minutes after hearing he had been chosen, incidentally on his 71st birthday.
“I was really speechless,” he said. “I am very surprised. This is the greatest honor you can think of in the life of a scientist.”
On December 10, the 111th anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, Professor Ertl and the other winners of the 2007 Nobel Prizes in science and literature will come to Sweden to receive their awards in a gala ceremony at Stockholm City Hall.
Source: VOA
NASA: Mars Lander Set to Launch on Saturday
August 4, 2007
After a nine-month journey, the probe will search beneath the frozen Martian surface for hints of an environment compatible with life, such as water and organic chemicals.
Bruce Betts of the nonprofit Planetary Society says the organization has prepared a gift for future visitors to Mars, a silica-glass DVD attached to the deck of the lander.
“And that DVD has two things on it. One, it’s got a quarter-million names of people who signed up to send their names to Mars, participate that way in the mission. And then it’s got the first library for Mars, which we call Visions of Mars, that has all sorts of stories and art about the Red Planet,” he said.
There are works of fiction and works of science by writers such as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan was one of the founders of the Planetary Society.
Betts says the distinctive red planet has always stirred the imagination. The 19th century observer Percival Lowell thought he saw canals there. It was an illusion, but the erroneous observation led to wild speculation about a Martian civilization. Lowell’s work is part of the digital library.
The disk also includes a work of fiction by H.G. Wells called “The War of the Worlds.” The DVD has the original text version of the story and its radio adaptation in a realistic 1938 broadcast.
The dramatization of an invasion by Martians was so convincing that it sparked a panic in some parts of the United States.
Betts says Phoenix is just one of a number of missions to Mars that are under way or planned by the U.S. space agency NASA and the space agencies of Europe and Russia. He notes there are launch opportunities every 26 months, when the Earth, Mars and Sun are properly aligned, and he sees a busy schedule ahead in coming launch windows.
“In the next opportunity in 2009, NASA will send a really big rover called Mars Science Laboratory, and it will actually have some of the first experiments since Viking in the 1970s that really look more directly for life as opposed to just studying questions of: could there have been life? Was there habitability?,” he said.
Russia is planning a 2009 sample return mission to the Martian moon Phobos. Two years later, a U.S. mission will study the upper atmosphere of Mars, and 2013 should see the launch of a NASA orbiter and a European rover.
Beyond that, the United States plans to return humans to our own moon by 2020, and then use the moon as a base for a human journey to Mars.
Source: VOA