Half of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Syukuro Manabe, born in Japan in 1931, and Klaus Hasselmann from Hamburg, also born in 1931, for “physical modeling of the earth’s climate and prediction of global warming”. The second half goes to the Italian Giorgio Parisi, born in 1948, for “discovering the interplay between disorder and fluctuations in physical systems” – from molecules to planetary systems. The Nobel Committee announced this on Tuesday.
Manabe’s last research was at Princeton University in the USA, Hasselmann at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and Parisi at La Sapienza University in Rome. The prize is endowed with ten million Swedish kronor, around 980,000 euros.
Klaus Hasselmann was born in Hamburg in 1931. He conducted research in the USA for a long time, until 1999 he was Scientific Director at the German Climate Computing Center in Hamburg.
(Photo: Jj Guillen / dpa)
Whether the dance of the molecules in a soup or in a vaccine, the interactions in the earth’s atmosphere or the forces of attraction in the vastness of space – what all these systems have in common is that they are so complex that they cannot be easily grasped intuitively. All three Nobel Prize winners had helped to better understand complex systems of various sizes and to predict their behavior, according to the jury’s statement. Among other things, this led to accurate predictions of global warming.
Manabe and Hasselmann made a decisive contribution to predicting global warming
Syukuro Manabe was able to show how the increasing amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere have led to an increase in the temperature of the earth’s surface. In the 1960s, according to the Nobel Foundation, he was the first to study the interaction between radiated sunlight and the earth’s air masses. This created the basis for the development of today’s climate models.
Syukuru Manabe conducts research at Princeton University in the United States.
(Photo: Johan Nilsson / TT via www.imago-images.de/imago images / TT)
In the years that followed, Klaus Hasselmann developed a computer model that examined the interaction between weather and climate for the first time. According to the Nobel Committee, this has shown that climate models can give an idea of how the earth is warming while the weather changes from day to day and is chaotic.
Hasselmann also developed methods to differentiate between natural occurrences and human influences on the earth’s climate. It was shown that global warming was actually triggered by human greenhouse gas emissions.
Giorgio Parisi works at the La Sapienza University in Rome.
(Photo: Lorenza Parisi / Wikimedia)
At the beginning of the 1980s, Giorgio Parisi discovered hidden patterns in physical systems that appear to be disordered. Such effects occur in a wide variety of areas, in biology, neuroscience, and mathematics. But they also play a role in machine learning.
“We have to react quickly now and not hesitate any longer”
The committee emphasizes that there are basically two different prices, which, however, are held together by the overarching theme of complexity and order. The first part of the award is also intended to be a warning to politicians: The science on which the climate models are based is solid, and there is no doubt about global warming. This message was underlined by Parisi, who was connected to the committee’s press conference by telephone after the announcement. “We have to react quickly now and not hesitate any longer,” he said in view of the rising temperatures. He himself did not expect the Nobel Prize today, but considered the possibility. That morning he always kept the phone close by. There could be a call from Stockholm after all.
Last year, the German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with two colleagues for exploring black holes. Since the first Nobel Prize was awarded 120 years ago, a total of 211 physicists have received awards. The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to just one person 47 times, the last time in 1992.
The Nobel Prize winners for Physiology or Medicine were announced on Monday. The US sensory researchers David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian are honored for their work on the sense of touch and temperature. The developers of the Covid vaccines, however, went away empty-handed.
The Nobel Medals and Diplomas will be awarded on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the winners in chemistry on Wednesday, followed by the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. On Friday the Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded in Oslo, and next Monday again in Stockholm the Prize for Economics, which is the only one that does not go back to Nobel’s will.