A professor at Princeton University was announced Tuesday as one of three people to win the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on climate change. The video above shows the announcement, as well as reaction from all three winners.
Syukuro Manabe, originally from Japan, joined Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy in being recognized.
“One half of the prize is awarded jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann, for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming,” Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Secretary-General Goran Hansson said. “The other half goes to Giorgio Parisi for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”
Starting in the 1960s, Manabe created the first climate models that forecast what would happen to the globe as carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere. About a decade later, Hasselmann helped explain why climate models can be reliable despite the seemingly chaotic nature of the weather.
“To go really from the very complicated, chaotic, complex system of the weather to the climate that needs some rather fancy mathematical operations and that’s what Hasselmann did,” Lars Bergstrom with the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences said. “He really now has given us this link between weather and climate.”
Meanwhile, Parisi “built a deep physical and mathematical model” that made it possible to understand complex climate systems, as well as in fields such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.
In accepting the award, the Nobel Prize winners discussed the current state of climate change. Hasselmann said he “would rather have no global warming and no Nobel prize.”
“We have to tell people to wake up, to recognize the fact that we are experiencing climate change and it’s going on a time scale that we’re not used to responding to,” Hasselmann said.
“It’s very urgent that we take real, very strong decisions and we move at very strong pace, because we are in a situation where we can have a negative positive feedback that may accelerate the increase of temperatures,” Parisi said.
