About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the future of humanity.
Oct 07, 2020...
Finally, some positive news about climate change: Even small groves in your backyard or city park help fight the effects of rising temperatures, drought and greenhouse gases.
“Urban orchards and green spaces can contribute to a range of ecosystem services,” writes Weizmann Institute of Science postdoctoral researcher Rafat Qubaja in a soon-to-be-published paper.
Those “services” include storing carbon, reducing air pollution, regulating the urban microclimate, cooling and shading, retaining rainwater and soil moisture, recharging groundwater and more.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/how-bushfire-smoke-traveled-around-the-world/
Mar 18, 2021... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—March 18, 2021—It’s not just how hot the fires burn – it’s also where they burn that matters. During the recent extreme fire season in Australia, which began in 2019 and burned into 2020, millions of tons of smoke particles were released into the atmosphere. Most of those particles followed a typical pattern and settled to the ground after a day or week; however, the particles created in fires burning in one area of the country managed to blanket the entire Southern Hemisphere for months. When studying particle-laden haze, two researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science noticed puzzling spikes in a certain measurement, and tracked the elevated levels to the fires in that area. Next, as reported in Science, the Israeli scientists uncovered the “perfect storm” of circumstances that swept the particles emitted from those fires into the upper atmosphere and spread them over the entire Southern Hemisphere.
Mar 18, 2021...
The 2019–20 wildfires in Australia injected huge amounts of smoke into the stratosphere, which has led to record aerosol levels over the southern hemisphere.
Ilan Koren at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Eitan Hirsch at the Israel Institute for Biological Research analysed satellite data collected between 1981 and 2020 to look at what effect the devastating bushfire season in Australia had on aerosol concentrations in the stratosphere.
Apr 16, 2021...
While Earth Day is 51 years old this year, the Earth is 4.54 billion years old – “plus or minus about 50 million years,” says the National Geographic Society. And yet in less than 200 years, the blink of an eye, humankind has thrown a wrench into our small planet’s carefully tuned systems.
Since the Industrial Age, our remarkable advances have had a flip side: chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels, and the like have fouled our water, land, and climate. We have increased Earth’s temperature, causing mass extinctions, stronger storms, devastating wildfires, flooding, and food shortages – consequences that will only increase. And while we can all take personal steps, there is ultimately one hope for mitigating human impacts on the planet: science.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/science-is-heeding-the-ocean-s-sos/
Jul 19, 2021...
What’s one of the first things you do when you get to the ocean? It’s probably to take a deep breath, inhaling the instantly familiar smell that inspires calm, evokes memories, and lets you know exactly where you are.
Every other breath you take is provided by the ocean, which supplies half of the entire planet’s oxygen. It is Earth’s life support system: it regulates our climate, feeds us and innumerable other species, and its health and well-being are critical to maintaining our own – yet we do not behave as though it is.
May 26, 2022... REHOVOT, ISRAEL – May 26, 2022 – About 30 massive, intricate computer networks serve the scientists who stand at the forefront of climate change research. Each network runs a software program comprised of millions of lines of code. These programs are computational models that combine the myriads of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena that together form the climate of our planet. The models calculate the state of Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice, capturing past and present climate variability and using the data to predict future climate change. These results are analyzed by leading research institutes across the globe, including the Weizmann Institute of Science, and then incorporated into the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report. Policymakers rely on the IPCC report when they form adaptation and mitigation strategies for climate change, one of our generation’s greatest crises.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/video-gallery/a-sustainable-future-our-vision/
Sep 07, 2022... Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science — with their pioneering spirit and a profound sense of urgency — are working to achieve transformational scientific breakthroughs and forge a path toward sustainability with innovative solutions to global warming, alternative energy, conservation, carbon reduction, food security, and much more.
Sep 09, 2022...
The climate crisis, its effects and ways to prepare for it will become a central topic of research, as per the Council on Higher Education's upcoming five-year program.
Israel's Council of Higher Education will for the first time allocate hundreds of millions of shekels over the next five years for research into the climate crisis and sustainability, Haaretz has learned.
The council's upcoming five-year program, the main principles of which were formulated over the past few months, represents a major step forward for Israeli climate research — an area of study extremely lacking in resources, especially compared to the enormous investments and research in these academic fields in other countries.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/look-on-the-bright-side-of-earth/
Jan 26, 2023... January 23, 2023—When looking at the Earth from space, its hemispheres – northern and southern – appear equally bright. This is particularly unexpected because the Southern Hemisphere is mostly covered with dark oceans, whereas the Northern Hemisphere has a vast land area that is much brighter than these oceans. For years, the brightness symmetry between hemispheres remained a mystery. In a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Weizmann Institute of Science researchers and their collaborators reveal a strong correlation between storm intensity, cloudiness and the solar energy reflection rate in each hemisphere. They offer a solution to the mystery, alongside an assessment of how climate change might alter the reflection rate in the future.
Feb 03, 2023... REHOVOT, ISRAEL— February 3, 2023 Arthropods crawl and buzz around us in the wild and on farmlands, on the street and at home, under our floors and in our plumbing systems, even in our food and on our bodies. But while we often are inconvenienced by this group of invertebrates – which comprises more than a million species, including all insects – their absence would be catastrophic: Arthropods are ecosystem engineers that pollinate our crops, turn over agricultural soils and sustain an enormous diversity of predators, from warblers to wolverines, that feed on them directly or indirectly.
©2023 American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science
