Claude Lorius was 91 years old and was the first to highlight the role of CO2 in global warming. In 2008, he received the Blue Planet Prize, a kind of Nobel prize for the environment. In 2015, he came to the Cannes Film Festival to present Luc Jacquet’s film “ ice and sky dedicated to his journey.
It was in 1965, in Adélie Land in Antarctica, while drinking a whiskey in which the ice cube was a piece of the ice cap, Claude Lorius noticed the air bubbles escaping from it. This is where the CNRS researcher had the idea of analyzing the air contained in the ice.
It will take a good twenty years to obtain scientific answers. As early as the 1970s, he began to suspect the role of human activities in global warming. In the middle of the Cold War, thanks to an extraordinary force of persuasion, he managed to work with the Americans and the Soviets.
In 1977-1978, after three years of scouting and ten years of preparation, he and his team began deep drilling of Dome C (southeast Antarctica), enabling them to trace 40,000 years of climatic history. In 1984, a mission to the Russian base in Vostok (1,500 km inside Antarctica) enabled him to go up ice 150,000 years old.
He can thus reconstruct a complete climatic cycle and observes that the temperature curves follow regular rhythms, before racing at the same time as those of CO2 since the middle of the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution. In other words, the more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the more the temperatures rise. These results were published in the journal Nature in 1984.
Fight against global warming
These are the discoveries that contributed to the awareness of global warming and to the launch of the IPCC, the group of experts on climate in 1988. The researcher then worked to mobilize for the fight against global warming.
Claude Lorius said he was more of an adventurer than a scientist. He led 22 polar expeditions in Greenland, but especially in Antarctica. From these often extreme experiences, he retained that solidarity is the only way to get out of vital difficulties. In 2002, he received the CNRS gold medal with his colleague and friend Jean Jouzel.
►Also read: Headlines: climate crisis, “last warning before the highway to hell”