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The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Tuesday to three scientists whose work “forms the foundation for our knowledge of Earth’s climate and how humanity affects it.”
The winners were Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University of Rome.
The study of all three is crucial to understanding how Earth’s climate has changed and how human behavior has influenced these changes.
“The discoveries accepted this year demonstrate that our knowledge of climate rests on a solid scientific foundation based on a rigorous analysis of observations,” said Thors Hans Hansson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
Complex systems such as climate are often defined by their irregularities. This year’s winners have helped bring understanding to the apparent chaos by describing these systems and predicting their long-term behavior.
Dr. Manabe showed how rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are leading to increased temperatures at the Earth’s surface.
“In the 1960s, he spearheaded the development of physical models of Earth’s climate and was the first to discover the interaction between radiation balance and vertical transport of air masses,” said the committee.
Ten years later, Dr. Hasselmann created a model that links weather and climate, “answering the question of why climate models can be reliable even though the weather is volatile and chaotic,” he said.
Dr. Parisi’s discoveries have been described as “among the most important contributions to the theory of complex systems”.
He is best known for his discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems, from the atomic scale to the planetary scale.
“It makes it possible to understand and describe many different and seemingly completely random materials and phenomena, not only in physics, but also in other very different fields such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning,” the committee said.
Why is work important?
All three scientists have been working for decades to understand the complex natural systems that cause climate change, and their discoveries provided the scaffolding on which climate predictions are built.
If the rise in global temperature is not stopped, the importance of their work has only gained urgency as predictive models look increasingly grim.
Even if all countries meet their promised emissions cuts, the global average temperature will rise by 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century; United Nations Report published in September.
This level of warming, measured relative to pre-industrial levels, is likely to increase the frequency of deadly heatwaves and threaten coastal cities with rising sea levels, according to the country-by-country analysis. concluded.
At the press conference held after the award was announced, Dr. “It is clear for the next generation that we need to act very quickly now,” Parisi said.
Who are the winners?
Dr. Manabe is a senior meteorologist and climatologist at Princeton University. Born in Shingu, Japan in 1931, he earned his doctorate. Before joining the U.S. Weather Bureau from the University of Tokyo in 1957 as a research meteorologist. In the 1960s, he pioneered groundbreaking research into how rising carbon dioxide levels led to higher temperatures on the Earth’s surface. This work “layed the foundation for the development of current climate models”. According to Nobel judges.
Dr. Hasselmann is a German physicist and oceanographer who greatly improved the public’s understanding of climate change by creating a model that connects climate and chaotic weather systems. He is a professor at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg. He received his doctorate degree. from the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1957 before establishing the meteorological institute, which he chaired until 1999. He is also the founder of what is now known as the Global Climate Forum. In 2009, Dr. Hasselmann, 2009 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change.
Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist born in Rome in 1948, whose research focuses on quantum field theory and complex systems. He received his doctorate degree. from Sapienza University of Rome in 1970. In 1980, he was responsible for discovering hidden patterns in irregularly complex materials. He is a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome.
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