Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to climate scientist 2021 Physics Prize winner announced

At about 5:48 pm Beijing time on October 5, the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced. It is worth noting that this year's Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by three scientists behind two different studies, and the award of one of the scientists was guessed by the prediction agency.

Of the three winners, Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann shared the award for their contributions to "Earth climate modeling, quantifying climate change, and making reliable predictions of global warming."

Italian scientist Giorgio Parisi also won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for his "discoveries of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic to the planetary scale."

Who is the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Physics?

Tokuro Manabe was born on September 21, 1931 in Shingu, Ehime Prefecture, Japan. He has become an American citizen and currently works at Princeton University in the United States.

Klaus Hasselmann was born on October 25, 1931 in Hamburg, Germany. He currently works at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany.

Giorgio Parisi was born on August 4, 1948 in Rome, Italy, and currently works at the University of Rome.

Why did they win the Nobel Prize?

These three scientists help us understand climate change.

According to the Nobel official website, Italian scientist Giorgio Parisi was awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his discoveries of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic to the planetary scale."

The other half was awarded to scientist Syukuro Manabe and German scientist Klaus Hasselmann "for physical modeling of the Earth's climate, quantifying changes and reliably predicting global warming."

The official website pointed out that Tokuro Manabe's research showed how the increase in carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere led to an increase in the earth's surface temperature, while some of Klaus Hasselmann's research was used to prove that the increase in atmospheric temperature was due to carbon dioxide emitted by humans.

Manabe Tokuro's research contributions

Tokuro Manabe was the first scholar to build a coupled atmosphere-ocean model to simulate the Earth's climate and to prove that carbon dioxide has an impact on the climate.

When building a model to study climate change, it is necessary to consider four components: the atmosphere, the ocean, the land surface, and the coast. In the past, there were only separate models for these four components, but Manabe Tokuro was the first person to combine them to build a model.

In addition, he also used computers to build models for the first time to prove the impact of carbon dioxide on climate change. His research also laid a theoretical foundation for future studies on climate change predictions in the next few decades.

Hasselmann found

Hasselmann's important research contribution is climate change detection and attribution. When analyzing climate change, there is a lot of "noise", that is, the changes in the temperature of the earth's climate system itself, which have nothing to do with human activities. Climate change detection and attribution research proves that the impact of human activities on climate change can be detected.

What do you think of the physics prize being awarded to a climate scientist for the first time?

Climate change science is a branch of physics, and the two climatologists who won the award this year all studied physics problems, so it was reasonable for them to win. However, in the past, the Nobel Prize in Physics was generally awarded to pure physics, while climate change science is relatively more applied, so from this perspective, their winning was unexpected.

Previously, climate chemists have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has won the Nobel Peace Prize, and climate change economists have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. This is the first time that the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a climate scientist. This also reflects the international community's high attention to the issue of climate change.