Developmentaid logo
Register

Three scientists awarded Nobel Prize in Physics for climate-related works

Joanna Kedzierska
Joanna Kedzierska Oct 12, 2021
Three scientists awarded Nobel Prize in Physics for climate-related works

Add us as your preferred source on Google to see more of our content in Search.

Google logoAdd to Preferred Sources

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics to three scientists for their groundbreaking climate-related works. Their discoveries have been fundamental to understanding what causes climate changes and linking this to the weather.

The awardees are scientists Syukuro Manabe from the U.S., Klaus Hasselmann from Germany, and Giorgio Parisi from Italy. Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, were jointly awarded for “the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences while Parisi, 73, received the other half of the award for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

Syukuro Manabe

Born in Japan, Syukuro Manabe worked for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) all his life until 1997 then, amongst other positions, he worked at Princeton University where he served as a senior meteorologist. Manabe’s work has been groundbreaking in understanding the link between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. Manabe developed his climate circulation model in the 1960s using a huge computer that occupied an entire room with only 1 MB of memory.

Hundreds of hours of testing brought him to the conclusion that carbon dioxide has a clear impact on a rise in temperature and thus an increase in the former triggers an increase in the level of the latter. All of climate science is based on this discovery thanks to it leading to an understanding of what climate changes are.

“He was the first scientist to do a thorough calculation that was reliable. Today, nearly every climate model relies on the groundbreaking research done by Manabe,” said Gunnar Ingelman, the Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

Klaus Hasselmann

This scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg added to Manabe’s findings. In 1980, he answered the question as to why climate models are reliable regardless of changeable weather by developing a model that linked weather and climate. He also discovered methods that allowed the identification of the impact that humans have on global temperatures.

Thanks to both Manabe and Hasselmann, it is possible to predict the trajectory of global warming.

Giorgio Parisi

The Italian Professor of Physics from University Sapienza in Rome was awarded for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

Parisi’s work may appear to be more obscure but it has also contributed to understanding the changeability of the climate. He was able to examine how material states change and his discoveries are applicable to many sciences from neuroscience and biology to machine learning, not simply climate science.

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to those involved in climate science in a year when the planet has witnessed record-breaking climate shocks such as heatwaves, wildfires, and floods.

Between them, the winners will receive 10 million Swedish kronor (US$1.1 million), half of which will go jointly to Manabe and Hasselmann and the other half to Parisi.