CITATION (EXCERPT)
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate Change category goes, in this sixteenth edition, to Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Jean Jouzel, Valérie MassonDelmotte, Jakob Schwander and Thomas F. Stocker for their contributions to the polar ice core records that establish a fundamental coupling between greenhouse gases and air temperature characterizing climate change over the past 800,000 years.
These records, from the thickest and oldest ice deposits on the planet in Antarctica and Greenland, show that changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, are accompanied by systematic changes in ambient air temperature across the globe. The polar ice records further reveal the natural variability of Earth’s climate, thus contextualizing current greenhouse gas concentrations and associated global warming. A signature finding from the ice core record is that over the past 800,000 years greenhouse gas concentrations due to natural variability have never reached the atmospheric levels seen today.
These achievements required scientific, technical and logistic breakthroughs in many areas and the development of novel analytical frameworks, building upon international collaborative efforts by generations of researchers.
