Two climate experts and a theorist take Physics Nobel
Climate modelling gets its due despite the doubters
Syukuro Manabe of the US and Japan, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy, yesterday won the Nobel Physics Prize for climate models and the understanding of physical systems, the jury said.
“Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it. Giorgio Parisi is rewarded for his revolutionary contributions to the theory of disordered materials and random processes,” the jury said. Manabe, 90, has US citizenship. Parisi is Italian and Hasselmann is German.
The prestigious prize is worth 10 million Swedish crowns (Dh4.22 million).
Starting in the 1960s, Manabe demonstrated how spikes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would raise global surface temperatures, laying the foundations for current climate models.
A decade later, Hasselmann created a model that helped explain why climate models can be reliable despite the seemingly chaotic nature of the weather. He also developed ways to look for specific signs of human influence on climate.
Parisi “built a deep physical and mathematical model’’ that made it possible to understand complex systems in fields as different as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.
Some non-scientists have ridiculed modelling, but it has been key to the way the world tackles change