The XVI BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, in its Climate Change modality, recognizes this year the work of five European researchers who paved the way to understand how global warming occurred, after establishing “a fundamental link” between gas concentrations greenhouse effect and the increase in atmospheric temperature throughout the planet. to verify, through pioneering exploration of polar ice, the “fundamental link” between greenhouse gas concentrations and the increase in atmospheric temperature across the planet over the last 800,000 years.
Thanks to a pioneering exploration of polar ice, the Danish Dorthe Dahl-Jensen (University of Copenhagen), the French Jean Jouzel and Valérie Masson-Delmotte (Paris Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences), and the Swiss Jakob Schwander and Thomas Stocker (University of Bern) showed that records from the thickest and oldest ice deposits on Earth, located in Antarctica and Greenland, “show that changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases – such as carbon dioxide carbon and methane – are accompanied by systematic changes in air temperature throughout the planet,” according to the jury.
The jury of the Frontiers of Knowledge award highlights that the research of the five scientists on the natural variability of the Earth’s climate has made it possible to “contextualize the current concentrations of greenhouse gases and the global warming associated with them” within the framework of history of our planet.
In the argument for the ruling, the committee of experts points out that the convergent research of the five winners reveals that “over the last 800,000 years, greenhouse gas concentrations due to natural variability had never reached current atmospheric levels.” ”, causing global warming caused today by human activity.
The award-winning contributions “have required scientific, technical and logistical advances in many areas to be able to measure greenhouse gas concentrations” and “are based on the uninterrupted international collaboration of several generations of researchers,” concludes the jury.
With their work, the winners warn about the impacts that the continued increase in temperatures could cause on the rise in sea levels, extreme climate episodes and the displacement of populations affected by these phenomena if greenhouse gas emissions are not stopped. greenhouse effects caused by the use of fossil fuels.
“The central message derived from the study of ice sheets is that CO2 and temperature are closely linked and that the concentrations of greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere today have no precedent in the last 800,000 years. This has profound implications for the evolution of our planet in the coming decades and centuries,” highlights Bjorn Stevens, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (Germany) and president of the jury.
