Dr. Richard Somerville, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and one of several lead authors of the most recent assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-mate Change (IPCC), spoke Thursday evening about the modern day threat of global warming, inaugurating Vanderbilt's Nobel Memorial Lecture series.

The Nobel Memorial Lecture series honors Vanderbilt alumni and faculty who have re-ceived the Nobel Prize and addresses the topic "Science in the Service of Society." Dr. Somerville's lecture was in honor of Vanderbilt alum, Nobel Laureate and former Vice President Albert Gore, with whom the IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their shared work in disseminating knowledge about the modern day global threat of climate change.

Gore studied first at the Divinity School from 1971 to 1972, and then in the Law School from 1974 to 1976. Gore chose not to earn a degree in order to successfully run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976.

Somerville's lecture, titled "Global Warming: What do we Know, What Should We Do?" reviewed the experimental evidence to date and its implications for the future.

He presented the most famous "Keeling Curve," which tracks the unabated rise in at-mospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide since 1958.

Somerville knew Charles Keeling personally and remembers him as a pioneering scien-tist. At the time, "Climatology was a backwater," said Somerville. "We were ill-equipped to do meteorology."

Keeling and others changed that and today, the science of climatology is cutting-edge.
"Science gets done by those not overly worshipful of authority," Somerville said, giving advice to Vanderbilt's students.

In addition to Al Gore, Vanderbilt alum Muhammad Yunus, who received his PhD in Economics in 1971, was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in develop-ing and using micro-credit to combat poverty in developing countries.

In total, the Vanderbilt faculty has been awarded the Nobel prize three times. Max Del-bruck, professor of physics from 1940 to 1947, won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Medicine for research conducted at Vanderbilt concerning the replication mechanisms of viruses. Delbruck is considered a founding father of molecular biology. Additionally, Earl Suther-land, the namesake of Vanderbilt's Sutherland Prize in Research, and Stanley Cohen are both Nobel Laureates in Medicine.