The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics rewards work related to climate change

After the Nobel Prize in Medicine, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded. It rewards two climate experts and a theorist specializing in disordered phenomena.

In full alarm on global warming , the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday, October 5, 2021 crowned two old experts in warming, the American-Japanese Syukuro Manabe and the German Klaus Hasselmann , as well as the Italian Giorgio Parisi, Italian theorist of disorderly phenomena .

This is the first time since 1995 and research on the ozone hole in chemistry that a Nobel scientist has been awarded to work directly related to climate change - but in a completely different emergency context.

A political echo

Syukuro Manabe, born in Japan 90 years ago but living in Princeton in the United States, and Klaus Hasselmann, 89 years old and based in Hamburg, were awarded for the first half of the prize "for the physical modeling of the climate of the Earth. , for having quantified its variability and reliably predicted global warming, ”according to the jury.

The Nobel Committee thus rewards Manabe's founding work on the greenhouse effect in the 1960s, by which he showed that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere corresponded to the increase in Earth's temperatures.

Hasselman is celebrated for having succeeded in establishing reliable climate models despite great weather variations, allowing a trend of daily chaos to emerge.

One month before COP26, the world climate summit organized in Glasgow, the award to the two experts in meteorology and climatology will necessarily have a strong political echo.

Al Gore and the UN's IPCC climate experts won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Specialist in understanding disorder

While the other half of the 2021 Physics Prize is not directly linked to the climate, the ability to understand disorder and fluctuations is the specialty of third winner Giorgio Parisi, 73, based in Rome.

His arduous work was among "the most important contributions" to the theory of so-called complex systems, explained the Nobel jury, which awarded him "for the discovery of the interaction of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems of the atomic to planetary scale ”.

“I think it is very urgent that we take very strong decisions (for the climate). It is clear that we must act very quickly and without delay in favor of future generations ”, affirmed the Italian laureate during a telephone press conference with the Nobel Foundation.

" Great news "

In Geneva, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) hailed “big news”. “This again demonstrates that climate science is highly valued and must be highly valued,” said Secretary General Petteri Taalas.

The three men will share the 10 million Swedish crowns (nearly 990,000 euros) of the reward in proportion to their share: 50% for Mr. Parisi, and 25% for the other two winners.

Last year, the prize was awarded to the Briton Roger Penrose, the German Reinhard Genzel and the American Andrea Ghez, three pioneers in research on "black holes" , regions of the Universe from which nothing can be done. escape.

Quantum physicists as well as Parisi served as favorites, according to experts interviewed by AFP, even if dozens of researchers around the world were considered nobelizable in physics.

In accordance with the unchanging order of attribution, medicine had launched the Nobel 2021 ball on Monday by crowning Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, whose work on touch and sensory receptors paved the way for combating chronic pain.

Health crisis obliges, for the second consecutive year, the winners will receive their prize in their country of residence, even if a little hope remains to welcome the one for peace in Norway.