Nobel Prize Physicist Wants To Reduce Carbon Footprints

BERKELEY, Calif. Oct. 12, 2007 (KGO) (KGO) -- A UC Berkeley professor who won a Nobel Prize last year, wasn't at all surprised to learn Al Gore had won today, for his work on global warming.

A UC Berkeley professor who won a Nobel Prize last year, wasn't at all surprised to learn Al Gore had won today, for his work on global warming.

It's an issue Dr. George Smoot has cared about for a long time, and he's taken some of the steps we all can take to reduce our carbon footprints.

Professor George Smoot of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at UC Berkeley won the Nobel Prize for physics last year.

He's a cosmologist and shared the prize with another scientist from NASA for their work on the origins of the universe.

While his work doesn't directly relate to global warming, it's an issue he embraced long before it became so popular.

"I've always been careful about conservation so one of the things I did was things everybody can do which is when PG&E had these programs with fluorescent lights to replace your lights, I replaced all the lights in my house with fluorescent lights," said Nobel Prize Winner George Smoot, Ph.D.

He's made other home improvements, and limited driving his car; something that's become more challenging since he won the Nobel Prize.

"One of the problems about getting the Nobel Prize is I get called to many more functions, and they give me a parking, special parking place. So I've been driving probably more than I normally do, but I still drive much less than that average American," said Smoot.

Professor Smoot met Al Gore most recently at the Academy Awards when the former vice president won for the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." He calls today's award political.

"The Peace Prizes tend to be political in the sense they wanted to reward people who are doing things that are helping the world in a global sense," said Smoot.

At a pre-scheduled meeting of physicists today at the lab, there was discussion about global warming. It remains the subject of debate whether the climate change phenomenon is real, man made or natural. Professor Smoot says we can't want for the definitive answer before we do something about it.

"I think that the problem is if you wait until all the evidence is in it's so hard to fix things at that point that you'll always have some part of the debate if you're going to move quickly enough to head things off before it becomes a crisis or a catastrophe," said Smoot.

News of the peace prize may give people direction.

"I think it's kind of exciting that people will pay attention to this, and think about how they might change their life a little bit so they don't have to change it a lot later on," said Smoot.

To read about Al Gore Winning the Nobel Peace Prize, click here.

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