Nobel Prize in Physics
- The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and the other half to Giorgio Parisi “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems.”
- This is the first time climate scientists (Manabe and Hasselmann) have been awarded the Physics Nobel. Last year, the award was given for the research into black holes.
Manabe and Hasselmann:
- Awarded for work in physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.
- Demonstrated how increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures, laying the foundations for current climate models.
Parisi:
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Awarded for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”
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He “built a deep physical and mathematical model” that made it possible to understand complex systems in fields such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.
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Manabe and Hasselmann too have been authors of previous IPCC reports. Both of them contributed to the first and third assessment reports, while Hasselmann was an author in the second assessment report as well.