Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

Subject – Science and Tech

Context – First Nobel for climate science

Concept –

• The Nobel Prize Committee said the Physics Prize this year was given for “ground-breaking contributions to our understanding of complex systems”.
• SyukuroManabe shared one half of the prize with Klaus Hasselmann, another climate scientist, while the other half went to Georgio Parisi for his contributions in advancing the understanding of complex systems.
  • These are systems with a very high degree of randomness; weather and climate phenomena are examples of complex systems.
• This is the first time climate scientists have been awarded the Physics Nobel. The IPCC had won the Peace Nobel in 2007, an acknowledgement of its efforts in creating awareness for the fight against climate change, while a Chemistry Nobel to Paul Crutzen in 1995, for his work on the ozone layer, is considered the only other time someone from atmospheric sciences has won this honour.
• The recognition of Manabe and Hasselmann, therefore, is being seen as an acknowledgment of the importance that climate science holds in today’s world.
• The 1967 paper by Manabe was seminal work. It was the first description of the processes of global warming.
  • Manabe and Wetherland also created a climate model for the first time.
  • The sophisticated models that we run today, which are so crucial to climate science, trace their ancestry to that model created by Manabe.
  • He was a pioneer in so many ways, and the father of climate modelling.
  • Manabe was also instrumental in developing the first coupled model, in which ocean and atmospheric interactions are modelled together, in the 1970s.
  • Manabe demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the climate.
• Hasselmann, a German, who too is now 90, is an oceanographer who ventured into climate science. He is best known for his work on identifying specific signatures, or “fingerprints” as the Nobel committee called them, in the climate phenomena that enabled scientists to ascertain whether these were caused by natural processes or human activities.
  • He created a computer model that linked together weather and climate. His work answered the question of why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic.

• Manabe and Hasselmann too have been authors of previous IPCC reports. Both of them contributed to the first and third assessment reports, while Hasselmann was an author in the second assessment report as well.
• Research by Manabe and Hasselmann led to computer models of the Earth’s climate that can predict the impact of global warming.
• Parisi, who is 73, found that hidden rules influence the apparently random behaviour of solid materials – and worked out a way to describe them mathematically.

Previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics

• 2020 – Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez received the prize for their work on the nature of black holes.
• 2019 – James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz shared the prize for ground-breaking discoveries about the Universe.
• 2018 – Donna Strickland, Arthur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou were awarded the prize for their discoveries in the field of laser physics.
• 2017 – Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish earned the award for the detection of gravitational waves.
• 2016 – David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz shared the award for their work on rare phases of matter.
• 2015 – Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald were awarded the prize the discovery that neutrinos switch between different “flavours”.