More than three dozen scientists and support staff at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) served as authors or reviewers for reports by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and several have played leadership roles. The IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. The Nobel committee cited the IPCC's two decades of scientific reports, saying they have "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming." Published this year, the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report presents a clear picture of a planet undergoing a rapid climate transition with significant societal and environmental impacts. The Community Climate System Model (CCSM) and Parallel Climate Model (PCM), developed and maintained by NCAR scientists and their colleagues in universities and national laboratories, played an important role in the Fourth Assessment Report. Experiments with these models enabled thorough investigation of multiple scenarios and climate simulations of unprecedented detail, providing much of the modeling data considered and analyzed by the IPCC. These contributions were made possible by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation’s strong support for the CCSM project and the advanced supercomputing needed to undertake large-scale climate model experiments. Japan’s Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry also provided significant support for CCSM development and experimentation for the IPCC. "I expect this will provide greater visibility to the issue of climate change and to the importance of educating the general public and decision makers about this critical problem," said NCAR senior scientist Kevin Trenberth, a coordinating lead author on this year's IPCC report. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal and it is very likely due to human activities, according to the IPCC. The science is settled in the sense that we know we need to take action." Trenberth, Gerald Meehl, and Guy Brasseur served as coordinating lead authors of the IPCC's Working Group I, which focused on the science of climate change. Five other scientists at NCAR served as lead authors of that report: William Collins, Elisabeth Holland, Reto Knutti, Linda Mearns, and Bette Otto-Bliesner. In addition, three NCAR scientists - Mearns, Kathleen Miller, and Patricia Romero Lankao -- served as lead authors for IPCC's Working Group II report this year. That report focused on the potential impacts of climate change and how society can adapt. In all, 40 NCAR staff served as coordinating lead authors, lead authors, reviewers, or contributors on the 2007 IPCC reports, with additional staff providing technical support. Find a list of NCAR authors and reviewers here. The IPCC, a group representing over 180 governments, operates under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization. It commissions assessments of global climate change by hundreds of scientists who are experts in the field.