[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 13 (Monday, January 28, 2008)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E75]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              TRIBUTE TO THE OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY

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                             HON. ZACH WAMP

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                        Monday, January 28, 2008

  Mr. WAMP. Madam Speaker, today I rise to honor the Oak Ridge National 
Laboratory (ORNL), which continues to be recognized for its critical 
work on environmental issues. The United Nations and the World 
Meteorological Organization's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
(IPCC) are co-winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, ``for their 
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,'' according to the Nobel 
announcement. The IPCC has benefited from the contributions of ORNL in 
several areas, from scientific research and policy studies to state-of-
the-art tools and facilities.
  Several ORNL researchers are co-authors, and in some cases, lead 
authors on IPCC studies and documents as part of a global effort to 
assess the realities and risks of human-induced global climate change 
on the basis of peer reviewed and published scientific literature. The 
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report produced four reports in 2007 that 
featured the involvement of ORNL scientists such as Corporate Fellows 
Tom Wilbanks and David Greene, and the Environmental Sciences 
Division's Paul Hanson, Virginia Dale and Gregg Marland.
  A very significant portion of the IPCC's study involved modeling of 
how climate change will affect a variety of important human and 
economic factors, from temperature to electrical costs. The scientific 
discovery for applications such as climate change modeling and 
simulation would not be possible without ORNL advanced computing 
capabilities, due to the enormous scale and complexity of climate data 
collected. ORNL's Center for Computational Sciences, home of the 
world's most powerful supercomputer for open science, ran the extremely 
complex models and provided infrastructure for more than one-third of 
the total U.S. contribution to the IPCC report.
  The climate study is the culmination of a six-year international 
effort. Regardless of one's views on climate change, there is no 
question that ORNL's computing resources and its human resources 
provided significant contributions to the IPCC. I am proud to honor the 
research that ORNL generates on an ongoing basis, but especially 
pleased to honor the leadership and commitment of everyone at ORNL for 
the efforts that contributed to the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007.




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