By Nneka Nwogwugwu
US-Japanese scientist Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy have won the Nobel Prize in physics for climate models and the understanding of physical systems.
The jury’s announcement came on Tuesday, a month before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, where global warming will top the agenda.
Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, share one half of the 10-million-kronor ($1.1m) prize for their research on climate models, while Parisi, 73, won the other half for his work on the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems, Aljazeera reports.
“Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it,” the Nobel Committee for Physics said in a statement.
“Giorgio Parisi is rewarded for his revolutionary contributions to the theory of disordered materials and random processes,” it added.
Manabe is affiliated with Princeton University in the US, while Hasselmann is a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.
Parisi is a professor at Sapienza University of Rome.
Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee, said “the discoveries being recognised this year demonstrate that our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations”.
Working in the 1960s, Manabe showed how levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere corresponded to increased Earth-surface temperatures.
He was influential in developing the physical models of Earth’s climate and worked on how exactly the heat energy received by Earth from the sun radiates back into the atmosphere.
Hasselmann was credited for working out how climate models can remain reliable despite sometimes chaotic variations in weather trends.
The Committee praised his identification of climate “fingerprints” caused by natural and human activities and how much climate change can be attributed solely to man-made emissions.
Parisi, who was awarded separately, was spotlighted for his work in the 1980s that the Committee said was “among the most important contributions” to the theory of complex systems.
His work made it possible for physicists to understand apparently entirely random materials, with wide-ranging applications including mathematics, biology and machine learning.