Smeal Alumnus Shares In Nobel Peace Prize

UNIVERSITY PARK, PA (October 24, 2007) – Penn State Smeal College of Business alumnus Bruce McCarl '73 Ph.D., Regents Professor of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University, shares in the Nobel Peace Prize recently awarded to former vice president Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

According to the IPCC, all lead authors on the books the panel has published on climate change are considered Nobel Laureates. In its latest book, coming out in November, McCarl is lead author in the chapter examining how agriculture could help counter the effects of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

McCarl earned his Ph.D. in management science from Smeal and has worked on climate change for more than 20 years, studying how agriculture could be affected and how it could play a role in mitigation.

As an economist, he has sought to identify the costs borne by agriculture due to climate change, and the most cost-effective ways that agriculture can play a role in countering the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, one of the primary causes of global warming.

McCarl joined the department of agricultural economics at Texas A&M in 1985 from prior faculty positions at Oregon State and Purdue universities. In addition to his Ph.D. from Smeal, he holds a bachelor's degree in business statistics from the University of Colorado.

IPCC is a network of more than 2,000 scientists who assessed on a comprehensive and objective basis the scientific, technicalm and socioeconomic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts, and options for adaptation and mitigation.