2024-01-11 11:48:24
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Jean Jouzel, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, Jakob Schwander and Thomas Stocker were the winners. Their research on the natural variability of the Earth’s climate allows them to give a context to the current concentrations of the greenhouse effect, revealing that in the period investigated, levels of CO2 as high as those observed today had never been recorded. , being the causes of global warming caused by human activities.
The winners warn about the effects that could be caused if greenhouse gas emissions, caused by the use of fossil fuels, are not stopped, such as extreme weather episodes and the displacement of populations affected by these phenomena.
The five winners have demonstrated that records from the thickest and oldest ice deposits on the planet, located in Antarctica and Greenland, “show that changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases – such as carbon dioxide or methane – are accompanied by systematic changes in air temperature across the planet.”
There are no precedents in the last 800,000 years
The president of the jury and director of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, Bjorn Stevens, states that “the central message derived from the study of ice sheets is that CO2 and temperature are closely linked and that greenhouse gas concentrations “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.”
To carry out the verification, the analysis of ice cores (cylindrical samples obtained by drilling the substrate at different depths) has been essential. “The ice tells us both what the temperature has been, through the analysis and interpretation of the stable isotopes of the water, and what the concentrations of greenhouse gases have been, thanks to the air trapped inside,” explains Dahl. Jansen.
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