The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics honors was awarded to two physics modeling experts on climate change, the American-Japanese Syukuro Manabe and the German Klaus Hasselmann, as well as the Italian theorist of complex physical systems Giorgio Parisi.
Half the award is given to Manabe, a 90-year-old Japanese-born scientist living in the United States, and Hasselman, 89 - both meteorological researchers - for "modeling the Earth's climate physics, quantitative variability and reliability, global warming forecast ", according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The prize is accompanied by a cash prize of 10 million Swedish kronor (985,000 euros).
With this Nobel prize in the midst of a climate crisis, the Swedish Academy recognised and awarded Manabe's 1960s work on the greenhouse effect, which showed that the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere correspond to the increase in temperature on Earth .
The German Klaus Hasselmann was honoured because he managed to establish reliable climate models despite the great meteorological deviations.
The other half of the prize is given to Parisi, 73, "for discovering the interaction of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales."
His arduous work is among the "most important contributions" to the theory of so-called complex systems.
Manabe is currently at Princeton University in the United States, Hasselmann at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and Paris at the University of Rome.
