New York Times - Cade Metz | Marc Santora | Cora Engelbrecht
The work of Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi
“demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid
scientific foundation,” the committee said.
|
Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, Klaus Hasselmann of the Max
Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and Giorgio
Parisi of the Sapienza University of Rome were awarded the prize in
Physics in Stockholm on Tuesday.
Credit...Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty
Images
|
Three scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for work that
is essential to understanding how the Earth’s climate is changing, pinpointing
the effect of human behavior on those changes and ultimately predicting the
impact of global warming.
The winners were Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, Klaus Hasselmann of the
Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and Giorgio Parisi of
the Sapienza University of Rome.
Others have received Nobel Prizes
for their work on climate change, most notably former U.S. Vice President Al
Gore, but the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said this is the first time the
Physics prize has been awarded specifically to a climate scientist.
“The
discoveries being recognized this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the
climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of
observations,” said Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for
Physics.
Complex physical systems, such as the climate, are often
defined by their disorder. This year’s winners helped bring understanding to
what seemed like chaos by describing those systems and predicting their
long-term behavior.
In 1967, Dr. Manabe developed a computer model
that confirmed the critical connection between the primary greenhouse gas —
carbon dioxide — and warming in the atmosphere.
That model paved the
way for others of increasing sophistication. Dr. Manabe’s later models, which
explored connections between conditions in the ocean and atmosphere, were
crucial to recognizing how increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet could
affect ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, said Michael Mann, a climate
scientist at Pennsylvania State University.
“He has contributed
fundamentally to our understanding of human-caused climate change and dynamical
mechanisms,” Dr. Mann said.
|
Syukuro Manabe of Japan in Sweden in 2018. He demonstrated how
increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to
increased temperatures on the surface of the Earth. Credit...Johan
Nilsson/TT News Agency Via, Afp-Getty Images
|
About a decade after Dr. Manabe’s foundational work, Dr. Hasselmann created a
model that connected short-term climate phenomena — in other words, rain and
other kinds of weather — to longer-term climate like ocean and atmospheric
currents.
Dr. Mann said that work laid the basis for attribution studies, a field of
scientific inquiry that seeks to establish the influence of climate change on
specific events like droughts, heat waves and intense rainstorms.
“It
underpins our efforts as a community to detect and attribute climate change
impacts,” Dr. Mann said.
|
Klaus Hasselmann, the German physicist and climate researcher, at
a news conference in Madrid in 2010. He created a model that links
weather and climate. Credit...J J
Guillen/EPA, via Shutterstock
|
Dr. Parisi is credited with the discovery of the interplay of disorder and
fluctuations in physical systems, including everything from a tiny collection of
atoms to the atmosphere of an entire planet.
The 2021 Nobel Prizes
“The main thing about his work is that it is incredibly eclectic,” said David
Yllanes, a researcher with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a nonprofit research
center. “Many important physical phenomena involve collective behavior that
arises out of fundamentally disordered, chaotic, even frustrated systems. A
system that looks hopelessly random, if analyzed the right way, can yield a
robust prediction for a collective behavior.”
These ideas can help
understand climate change, which “involves fluctuations that come from the
interaction of many, many moving parts,” Dr. Yllanes said.
But Dr.
Parisi’s effect on climate science is small compared to his impact across many
other fields, including mathematics, biology and computing. This involves
everything from lasers to machine learning.
|
Giorgio Parisi on the balcony of his residence in Rome, on
Tuesday. Credit...Alessandra
Tarantino/Associated Press
|
Dr. Manabe and Dr. Hasselmann will split half of the approximately $10 million
prize. The other half will go to Dr. Parisi, whose work was largely separate
from that of the other two. After the prize was awarded, many climate scientists
said they were only marginally aware of Dr. Parisi’s work — or had not heard of
him at all.
Dr. Manabe said in a phone interview that five days ago a
group of Japanese journalists contacted him saying they had heard a rumor that
he would soon win the Nobel Prize. But he did not believe them.
Then,
early this morning, he received a phone call from the Nobel committee.
“That’s
when I believed I had won,” he said.
Three hours after the prize was
announced, Dr. Manabe said he was not aware he was sharing the prize with two
others. He praised Dr. Hasselmann’s work and how it built on his own, but said
he was not familiar with Dr. Parisi.
After taking the call from the
committee, Dr. Manabe parsed through the list of past winners of the Physics
prize, before realizing this was the first time the prize has been awarded for
climate science.
“I think they have made a point of choosing
something that is critical to society,” he said.
Work that helps forecast our warming future.
All three scientists have been working to understand the complex natural
systems that have been driving climate change for decades, and their discoveries
have provided the scaffolding on which predictions about climate are built.
The
importance of their work has only gained urgency as the forecast models reveal
an increasingly dire outlook if the rise in global temperature is not
arrested.
In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
or IPCC, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations,
released a report
showing that the nations of the world can no longer stop global warming from
intensifying.
The global average temperature will rise 2.7 degrees Celsius by century’s end
even if all countries meet their promised emissions cuts under the Paris
Agreement.
That temperature rise is likely to bring more extreme wildfires, droughts and
floods, according to a
United Nations
report released in September.
The IPCC report says that nations have
a short window in which to curb fossil-fuel emissions and prevent the worst
future outcomes. And that work builds directly on Dr. Manabe’s models.
“The
climate scientists of today stand on the shoulders of these giants, who laid the
foundations for our understanding of the climate system,” said Ko Barrett,
senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, who is also vice-chair of the IPCC.
Robert Kopp, a
climate scientist at Rutgers University who also worked on the IPCC report,
called Dr. Manabe a critical figure in the rise of climate science in the
mid-1960s.
“He took the weather models that were beginning to emerge
in the period after World World II and turned them into the first climate
models,” he said.
Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the
University of Leeds in England, called Dr. Manabe’s 1967 paper detailing these
models “arguably the greatest climate-science paper of all time.”
Dr.
Barrett also hailed Dr. Hasselmann and Dr. Parisi for expanding on this work and
praised the Nobel Committee for showing the world that today’s climate studies
are grounded in decades of scientific work. “It is important to understand that
climate science is built on basic foundations of physics,” she said.
Who are the winners?
Dr. Manabe is a senior meteorologist and climatologist at Princeton
University. Born in 1931 in Shingu, Japan, he earned his Ph.D. in 1957 from the
University of Tokyo before joining the U.S. Weather Bureau.
In the 1960s, he led groundbreaking research into how increased levels of carbon
dioxide lead to higher temperatures on the surface of the Earth. That work “laid
the foundation for the development of current climate models,”
according to the Nobel judges.
Dr. Hasselmann is a German physicist and oceanographer who greatly advanced
public understanding of climate change through the creation of a model that
links climate and chaotic weather systems. He is a professor at the Max Planck
Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the
University of Göttingen in Germany before founding the meteorology institute,
which he was head of until 1999.
He is also the founder of what is now known as the Global Climate Forum. In
2009, Dr. Hasselmann received the 2009
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
in Climate Change.
Dr. Parisi is an Italian theoretical physicist who was born in 1948 in Rome and
whose research has focused on quantum field theory and complex systems. He
received his Ph.D. from the Sapienza University of Rome in 1970. In 1980, he was
responsible for discovering hidden patterns in disordered complex materials. He
is a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome.
Referring to
forecasts for the changing climate at a news conference after the prize was
announced, Dr. Parisi said, “It’s clear that for the future generation, we have
to act now in a very fast way.”
Who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics?
The physics prize
went to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their discoveries
that have
improved the understanding of the universe, including work on black holes.
Who else won a Nobel Prize in the sciences in 2021?
On Monday, the
prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded
to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for work that has led to the development
of nonopioid painkillers.
Who else won Nobel Prizes in science in 2020?
When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
-
On Wednesday, the Chemistry prize will be announced in Stockholm.
-
The prize in Literature will be announced in Stockholm on Thursday. Read
about
last year’s winner, Louise Glück.
-
The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Oslo. Read about last
year’s winner,
the World Food Program.
-
On Monday, the prize in Economic Sciences will be announced in Stockholm.
Last year’s prize was shared by
Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson.
Links
