Syukuro Manabe, a Japanese-born American, Klaus Hasselmann, a German, and Giorgio Parisi, an Italian, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 for work that aids in the understanding of complicated physical processes such as the Earth's shifting climate.
One-half of the 10-million Swedish krone prize goes in equal parts to Manabe, and Hasselmann, for modeling the earth's climate and reliably predicting global warming, according to a decision hailed by the United Nations weather agency as a sign of forming consensus around man-made global warming. Mr. Manabe illustrated how increases in the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would boost global temperatures beginning in the 1960s, providing the groundwork for today's climate models. Mr. Hasselmann developed a model that connected weather and climate a decade later, which helped to explain why climate models can be accurate despite the weather's seeming chaos. He also devised methods for detecting particular indicators of human-caused climate change.
The other half of the award goes to Parisi, who discovered hidden laws behind seemingly random motions and swirls in gases and liquids in the early 1980s, which may be applied to elements of neurology, machine learning, and starling flight formations. Mr. Parisi created a profound physical and mathematical model that allowed complicated processes in disciplines as diverse as mathematics, biology, neurology, and machine learning to be better understood.