For Ken Skog, it came as a pleasant surprise.
“It was kind of a fun thing,” says Skog, an economist with the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, on hearing last month that he’d won â?? sort of â?? the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. “Folks at the lab made a big to-do about it.”
Skog, 58, is one of hundreds of scientists who’ve played a part in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the award with former Vice President Al Gore. He was a lead author of a chapter in an IPCC report, released in 2006, which dealt with carbon storage in harvested wood products.
Several UW-Madison scientists played similar roles on the IPCC. But their achievement has gone locally unrecognized and unheralded. “There was no pick-up,” says UW research spokesperson Terry Devitt, referring to a press release on this topic.