An Imperial scientist takes a share in one of the world’s greatest honours

Oceanographer shares in Nobel Prize –<em>News</em>

By Colin Smith
Thursday 1 November 2007

An Imperial College London oceanographer’s pioneering work on climate change has earned him a share of the world’s most prestigious scientific prize.

Emeritus Professor John Woods   , from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, shares in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US Vice President Al Gore.

The Nobel Prize Foundation awarded the honour in recognition of the efforts by the IPCC and Mr Gore on man-made climate change. Professor Woods’ share of the award stems from his leading role in the first Scientific Assessment by the IPCC in 1989.

Professor Woods has had an extensive scientific career. He was head of Imperial’s Earth Science and Engineering Department (1994-1996) and founding Dean of the Graduate School of the Environment (1994-97). His early research at Imperial in the 1960s investigated the effects of turbulence on tropical rain formation. Later his interests turned to modelling complex systems including the plankton ecosystem and its affect on the environment.

He served on international committees for the Global Atmospheric Research Programme, World Climate Research Programme, Climate Change in the Ocean and International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, which were attempting to solve the problem of modelling climate change. When they started thirty years ago the science was theoretical and untested.

He said that in the late 1970s and 1980s scientists were looking for ways to forecast the climate 100 years into the future. The existing, purely atmospheric, models were proving inadequate because the atmosphere loses its ‘memory’ in less than one month.

Professor Woods, and others, decided to investigate other components of the climate system to find an answer. They focused on the ocean.

“The ocean directly influences the climate. The world ocean takes a thousand years to circulate. It takes a long time to adjust to forcing by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So we speculated that climate predictability lies in the ocean circulation. In those days we were still desperately unsure about how the ocean influenced climate change.

His work got the attention of IPCC and he was asked to be lead author on modelling climate change due to rising greenhouse gases in the first Scientific Assessment. His chapter made the first assessment about what could then be safely said about the effects of CO2 in climate change, using coupled ocean-atmosphere models.

He describes this time in his career as extremely exciting: “There was great debate amongst scientists, a lot of ‘to-ing’ and ‘fro-ing’ to establish an international consensus.”

The assessment team established a key set of priorities in oceanography and decided to undertake the mammoth task of surveying the world’s ocean currents, the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), which he co-chaired.

“We decided very bravely to map the ocean circulation from top to bottom, pole-to-pole. The project involved launching 6 satellites and rebuilding or replacing most the world’s largest oceanographic research ships. We had to cut the largest British research ship ‘Discovery’ in half and add a new 12m section to increase its range and house all the scientists needed.”

WOCE was one of the biggest experiments undertaken for climate change. The IPCC secured backing from the UN to convince governments around the world to fund the project and to encourage many of the world’s leading oceanographers to leave their research and focus on the global project, which cost billions of pounds and took 10 years to complete.

Ocean modellers enlisted researchers at Los Alamos in the USA who had the giant computers needed to exploit the results of WOCE. But even the largest super computers struggled to model the ocean circulation.

WOCE provided essential data to establish how the ocean plays a crucial role in the Earth’s climate system by transporting heat around the world and releasing it to the atmosphere in distant places.

“The first IPCC Scientific Assessment was a landmark in science; there was no precedent in any other scientific discipline. Nobody knew what a global assessment was. I am proud to say that we taught ourselves how to do it and we seemed to have got it right. The assessment was taken seriously by governments and used as a basis for developing policies to address climate change."

Those early assessments helped to clarify priorities for future climate research and confirmed that man-made climate change was beginning to affect the planet.

Now in its fourth assessment, the IPCC is more than 90 per cent certain that humans are the prime agents behind changes to the Earth’s climate.

In December this year, the IPCC and Mr Gore will formally receive the award from the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. On 5th November the UK government will hold a ceremony to congratulate UK recipients. Professor Woods will be amongst other researchers and the secretariat celebrating the outstanding British contribution to climate change.

Imperial College London now has a climate change research centre. The Grantham Institute for Climate Change was established in February 2007 through a £12 million donation from Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham. The Institute, based at Imperial’s South Kensington Campus, aims to generate and communicate the highest quality multi-disciplinary research on climate change, drawing on the existing expertise across the College’s Faculties of Natural Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the Tanaka Business School. Working with external partners, the Institute aims to translate this research into sustainable technological, political and socio-economic responses to climate change. The Institute has already funded seven new PhD research posts and further PhD and academic posts will be advertised over the next few months.