Co-founder of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Bert Bolin has died aged 82 of stomach cancer, just months after the IPCC shared the honour of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Bolin, who was a meteorologist and also served a stint as scientific director of the European Space Agency, was invited to accept the prize but was too unwell to travel.

“Bert Bolin will be best remembered by scientists for his pioneering studies of the carbon cycle and the coupled interactions between the atmosphere and terrestrial and marine ecosystems,” said David Karoly of the University of Melbourne, a lead author on the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, in a press release for the Science Media Centre. In the early 1960s, Bolin and Charles David Keeling together demonstrated that fossil-fuel emissions indeed contribute significantly to the global distribution of the gas, for example. “However, his lasting legacy to humankind will be his masterful parenting and leadership of the IPCC from its birth in 1980 to its adolescence.”

Bolin’s name appears many times in Nature, as a meteorologist but also as a commentator on climate change policy (see Nuclear Radiation Measurements During the International Geophysical Year(1957); Interactions of biogeochemical cycles (1981); Next step for climate-change analysis (1994); Berlin and global warming policy (1995))

The current leader of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, was highlighted in 2007 as Nature’s ‘newsmaker of the year’.