Nobel prize in physics goes to trio whose research alerted the world to climate change

Representatives from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences sit in front of a screen displaying the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics.

(Image credit: Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images)

The 2021 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists whose work laid the foundations for how we understand complex physical systems, including Earth's climate.

Syukuro Manabe, of Princeton University in New Jersey, and Klaus Hasselmann, formerly of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, will share one-half of the prize "for the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming." Giorgio Parisi, of Sapienza University of Rome, will receive the other half "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which is responsible for selecting the Nobel laureates in physics, announced Tuesday (Oct. 5).

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Manabe began this work in the 1960s, as the first person to explore how Earth's energy balance — the difference between the amount of the sun's energy received by Earth compared with the energy sent back to space — could affect atmospheric movements. With this understanding, he demonstrated the link between more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increased temperatures at Earth's surface — work that is used in climate models today.

Roughly 10 years later, Hasselmann made a model that linked weather with climate, showing how climate models could make reliable long-term predictions in spite of the varied and chaotic nature of short-term weather patterns. This work also allowed him to develop methods that spotted the telltale "fingerprints" of acute events, both natural and human, that impacted the climate. These methods were later used to prove that increases in atmospheric temperatures resulted from carbon dioxide emissions from human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels.

Around 1980, Parisi followed up this work with a more theoretical look at how hidden patterns could be spotted in complex systems. By investigating a metallic alloy called spin glass — a material in which iron atoms that are dispersed across a grid of copper lead to significant changes to the material's magnetic properties — he described how seemingly small adjustments to large systems can have profound effects. This led to many subsequent insights, not just into the physics of the climate but also in fields as diverse as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.

"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," Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in the statement. "This year's Laureates have all contributed to us gaining deeper insight into the properties and evolution of complex physical systems."

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Ben Turner is a U.K. based writer and editor at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.