Robert Ballard

Robert ballard is a former commander in the United States Navy and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology. He is most famous for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the wreck of the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown in 1998. Most recently he discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited the Solomon Islander natives who saved its crew.

Al gore nobel prize

the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday, and the former vice president used the attention to warn that global warming is "the greatest challenge we've ever faced."
World leaders, President Bush among them, congratulated the winners, while skeptics of man's contribution to warming criticized the choice of Gore.
Gore in a statement said he was " deeply honored ... We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity." "It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced, but it is also the greatest opportunity we have had to make changes," he later said at a brief news conference in Palo Alto, Calif.
Gore did not take any questions. As he walked away a reporter asked if he would run for president, but Gore did not respond.
Gore’s film "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary on global warming, won an Academy Award this year. He had been widely expected to win the peace prize.
"His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change," the Nobel citation said. "He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted."
It cited Gore's awareness at an early stage "of the climatic challenges the world is facing."

bears and global warming

In 2007, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act, enacted in 1973, is the nation's primary tool for conserving imperiled plants and animals.
The Secretary of Interior listed the polar bear as threatened but restricted the Endangered Species Act's protections and thus the polar bear's future is still very much in jeopardy

The Endangered Species Act's ultimate goal is to recover threatened and endangered species to the point where they no longer need the law's protections.
The chief threat to the polar bear is the loss of its sea ice habitat due to global warming. However, the polar bear is also stressed by other human activity, particularly oil and gas development activities in its habitat.
According to scientists, saving wildlife from the threat of global warming requires more than reducing global warming pollution. To help wildlife cope with the stress caused by climate change, natural resource managers must take action to reduce non-climatic stressors. In the case of the polar bear, this means that natural resource managers must limit oil and gas development in the polar bear's habitat. The Alaskan polar bear population relies heavily on the Arctic coastal plain for denning. It also relies on the ice on the Beaufort and Chukchi seas for both denning and hunting. Both of these habitat areas are threatened by increasing oil and gas development. Although the polar bear is now listed as a threatened species, the Secretary of Interior limited certain protections for the polar bear and will allow oil and gas development to continue in important polar bear habitat.

Global Warming

is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. Global surface temperature increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the last century.[1][A] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century was caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation.[1] The IPCC also concludes that variations in natural phenomena such as solar radiation and volcanoes produced most of the warming from pre-industrial times to 1950 and had a small cooling effect afterward.[2][3] These basic conclusions have been endorsed by more than 40 scientific societies and academies of science,[B] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized