The American-Japanese Syukuro Manabe and German Klaus Hasselmann are distinguished for their work on global warming, and Italian Giorgio Parisi for the study of disordered physical systems “atomic scale to that of planets “.
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The Nobel Prize for Physics 2021 reward “Revolutionary contributions to our understanding of complex systems”. Behind this expression hides phenomena for a long time very debated, as the evolution of the terrestrial climate under the influence of human activities. And others more confidential, such as how atoms can organize according to their magnetism, within an alloy.
The Nobel committee has chosen to share its price. A half has been attributed jointly to the American-Japanese Syukuro Manabe and German Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modeling of the climate of the Earth, the quantification of the variability and the reliable prediction of global warming”, and the other Half to Italian Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interaction of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems, atomic ladder on a global scale”.
If the Nobel de la Peace had already been granted in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the US Vice President Al Gore “for their efforts to increase and disseminate knowledge about Climate change due to man, and lay the groundwork for the measures needed to counter this change “, this time, it is the research that founded this knowledge that is honored.
” A short time on the other teams “
Syukuro Manabe has been one of the pioneers of climate modeling. Today 90 years old, he left the ruins of Japan from the 1950s for New Jersey. In Princeton, where John Von Neumann launched the first computers projects, he will be able to push the first weather simulations towards the climatic domain. “He wondered what a model would give to infinity,” says the climateologist V. Balaji, who always rubbed him in Princeton before the Pandemic of Covid-19 contrains the teams with confinement.
Manabe is thus the first to model the movements of the air masses in the atmosphere. In 1967, it simulates the increases in the surface temperature induced by a doubling of the concentration in co 2 of the atmosphere. In 1975, another flagship publication where he manages this time to couple the behavior of the ocean and the atmosphere “already showed that the system was to warm up,” says V. Balaji.
“I have always been very inspired by his articles, by the clarity with which he has asked all these problems in a successive way, entrusts the Climatologist Hervé Treut, the Pierre-Simon Institute Laplace. If we dared a comparison with comics, it would be a little clear line of Hergé, looking for highlights, with some form of scientific elegance. And always a little step ahead of the other teams. “
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