Trio win Nobel in physics for decoding climate complexities, warming

Stockholm, October 5

Japanese-born American Syukuro Manabe, German Klaus Hasselmann and Italian Giorgio Parisi won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for work that helps understand complex physical systems such as earth’s changing climate.

In a decision hailed by the UN weather agency as a sign of a consensus forming around manmade global warming, one half of the 10-million Swedish crown ($1.15-million) prize goes in equal parts to Manabe (90) and Hasselmann (89) for modelling earth’s climate and reliably predicting global warming.

The other half goes to Parisi for discovering in the early 1980s “hidden rules” behind seemingly random movements and swirls in gases or liquids, which can also be applied to aspects of neuroscience, machine learning and starling flight formations.

“Manabe and Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the earth’s climate and how humanity influences it. Parisi is rewarded for his revolutionary contributions to the theory of disordered materials and random processes,” the Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

“Hasselmann, who is at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, said he did not want to wake up from what he described as a beautiful dream. I am retired and a bit lazy lately,” he added. Hasselmann developed models that became instrumental in proving carbon dioxide emissions cause rising temperatures in the atmosphere. — Reuters