Leverkusen, June 4, 2012 – Tiny solid or liquid particles that occur in the atmosphere in mixtures with gases – so-called aerosols – can, under certain circumstances, lower the temperature of the Earth and thus diminish climate change. The atmospheric formation of those tiny particles is crucial to climate. Climate research owes this fundamental finding to Professor Markku Kulmala from the University of Helsinki. The 53-year old Finn, one of the world's leading geoscientists, receives the Bayer Climate Award 2012 for his pioneering work in the field of aerosol research. The award comes with prize money of EUR 50,000. The presentation will be made during the annual conference of the Leopoldina – German Academy of Sciences (topic: "The Role of Science in Global Change") in Berlin on September 22, 2012.
“We have made a point of announcing the winner of the Bayer Climate Award 2012 to coincide with tomorrow's World Environment Day. Fighting climate change continues to be a long-term task that has to be solved jointly by politicians, industry, society and the scientific community,” said Professor Wolfgang Plischke, member of the Board of Management of Bayer AG responsible for Innovation, Technology and Sustainability and Director of the Bayer Science & Education Foundation. “The contributions Professor Kulmala has made to research have shifted aerosols into the spotlight as a fundamental climate factor and have thus driven basic research on climate change further forward.”
“Receiving the Bayer Climate Award is a big honor for me,” said Professor Kulmala. “I very much appreciate the commitment Bayer is making. The company not only invests a great deal in its own research and development, it also supports external research through cooperation agreements and through its foundation. We need this attitude from industry to ensure that sufficient attention is paid to the climate sciences beyond academia.”
Aerosols and Climate
Aerosols or aerosol particles are regarded as potential "climate coolers." At high atmospheric humidity, water can condense on the particles so that water droplets form, from which brighter and longer-lived clouds can develop. The clouds can scatter sunlight back into space and thus counter global warming due to greenhouse gases. However, there are simply still too many unknowns for an accurate quantitative analysis of the effect of aerosols in the atmosphere.
For example, not all aerosol particles behave in the same way from a physical point of view. Salts reflect sunlight while soot particles absorb it. At the same time, the effect of one type of particle varies depending on the location. In the troposphere, soot particles, for instance, bring about an increase in temperature through their absorption of light because they emit heat radiation. Recently the findings related to biogenic organic aerosols have shown connections between carbon sink and aerosol formation. Further research is needed in this field, and scientists will be able to build on the important findings that have emerged from Kulmala’s work.
The contribution made by Prof. Kulmala
The aerosol particles themselves are formed through the agglomeration of molecules. This process, also known as nucleation, has not yet been adequately researched and understood by scientists. Prof. Kulmala works in the field of aerosol particle dynamics. His research results are helping us to better understand the process of nucleation. Kulmala showed using continuous comprehensive data obtained since 1996, for example, that the nucleation of aerosol particles is a global phenomenon and occurs constantly in the atmosphere. Until his results were published, this was thought to be a fairly rare occurrence. Kulmala's findings on the relationship between aerosols, clouds, climate and biosphere have provided an important basis for understanding the influence of air pollution on the process of climate change better. He uses a wide variety of scientific disciplines, combining results from theoretical and experimental physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology and biology.. Several research groups throughout the world are currently occupied with the mechanisms researched by Kulmala. According to the "ISI Web of Knowledge" database (compiled by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) owned by the media group Thomson Reuters), Kulmala is currently the most cited geoscientist in the world.
For the award winner, who was appointed Professor of the Year 2012 by the Finnish Union of University Professors and holds an Honorary Doctorate from three Universities in Stockholm, Tartu and Budapest, it is especially important to establish scientific findings as a basis for political decisions. Kulmala strongly advocates this, including in his position as Chairman of the Climate Panel of the Finnish Environment Ministry.
Award history and Bayer's involvement in climate issues
Kulmala is the third winner of the Bayer Climate Award. Before him, it was won by energy efficiency expert Prof. em. Eberhard Jochem (2008) and polar and marine researcher Prof. Peter Lemke (2010). It is awarded every two years by the Bayer Science & Education Foundation. When it was established in 2008, the Bayer Climate Award was the first international science prize donated by a company for basic research in climate sciences. As part of the Bayer Climate Program, the Bayer Science & Education Foundation also awards scholarships to schoolchildren every year to take part in an international sustainability camp.
In its business activities, Bayer also works on solutions for climate protection and dealing with the consequences of climate change. In addition to health care and nutrition, climate protection is a key part of the company's sustainability strategy. The climate strategy itself is based on a dual approach: first, the company aims to further reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions especially in production – by 35 percent per metric ton of product sold by 2020 compared with 2005. The lever for this is the energy efficiency increase that can be attained with new technologies. A typical example is a new process for the otherwise energy-intensive chlorine production, with which indirect greenhouse gas emissions are also reduced by around 30 percent.
Second, Bayer is placing increasing emphasis on the development and marketing of resource-saving products. Examples of this include raw materials for insulation products for buildings and refrigerators, lightweight plastics for cars, and high-grade materials for rotor blades on wind farms. Through its MaterialScience subgroup, the company already records EUR 2.4 billion – approx. 20 percent – of its annual sales in these areas of business with resource-conserving products. Research projects in the field of CropScience aimed at adapting to the consequences of climate change focus, for example, on increasing the resistance of crops to drought and temperature fluctuations and on developing new active ingredients to combat carriers of spreading infectious diseases such as malaria.
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