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# Samohi grad awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/samohi-grad-awarded-the-nobel-peace-prize/
- Published: 2007-10-29T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T03:42:42.000Z
- Author: Melody Hanatani
- Tags: Education, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*Loyola Marymount professor earns a Nobel*

LOS ANGELES When Jeremy Pal watched “An Inconvenient Truth,” he came into the movie with not much expectations and a slight dislike for the star of the documentary.

Little did the Loyola Marymount University professor know that he would one day be among the group of scientist sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the former Vice President Al Gore.

“It was better than I expected it to be,” the Santa Monica High School graduate said on Thursday. “Obviously, Al Gore is not a scientist or researcher in any sort of form... but all things considered, he did a pretty good job and came off being quite likable in my opinion.”

The Nobel Foundation announced the 2007 laureates earlier this month, naming Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 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.

Pal, a professor of civil engineering and environmental science, is among a group of contributing authors with the IPCC, a collaboration of scientists, that earned the prize in the category of peace.

“It’s a great honor to be part of that process that led to the peace prize,” Pal said.

The 37-year-old Pal was born in Santa Monica and raised in Venice, graduated from Lincoln Middle School and later from Santa Monica High School in 1988\. He went on to attend Santa Monica College for a brief period of time before moving on to Loyola Marymount University where he graduated with his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and later MIT for his post-graduate studies.

Before he joined the faculty at his alma mater, Pal worked for five years at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics as a scientist.

Pal, who now lives in Westchester, was attracted to the field of environmental science because of his love for natural resources and the great outdoors.

“We are natural and we are part of nature,” he said. Founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Association and the United Nations Environmental Programme, the IPCC aims to find a scientific consensus as to what is happening to the climate, assessing published reports and research. The group is split into three different focus groups and one task force, each assessing a different aspect of climate change, from the options of limiting greenhouse gases to the negative and positive effects of climate change.

Pal, who joined the Swizterland-based organization three years ago, focuses his work on regionalizing projections of potential global warming, exploring weather data on regions such as Los Angeles and parts of Europe and Asia.

“I look at changes in extreme temperatures and precipitation... and see how that would impact water resources and agriculture and human health,” Pal said.

Several of the IPCC’s working groups issued reports earlier this year that concluded that most global warming to date has been caused by human beings and is virtually certain to increase or continue in the future due to human activities, one of the biggest culprits being emission.

“There’s a lot of pride in the sense that the product developed by the IPCC is really well received and now the dissemination of the report is going to be wider,” said Dr. Kristen Averyt, spokeswoman for the IPCC. “The public in particular will really get to know the product.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/102907-01_01.jpg)

(Photo: Photo courtesy)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 29, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/102907.pdf?ref=smdp.com)