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Climate Science at the Forefront as New Nobel Prizes Are Announced

• https://apnews.com/article/nobel-prizes-science-reinhard-genzel-roger-penrose-europe-2259a97932e3c368fdbd870841f16264

STOCKHOLM / Via the Associated Press

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for work that found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.

Syukuro Manabe, originally from Japan, and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany were cited for their work in “the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.” The second half of the prize went to Giorgio Parisi of Italy for explaining disorder in physical systems, ranging from those as small as the insides of atoms to the planet-sized.

In recognition of the climate challenges his work helped reveal, Hasselmann told The Associated Press he “would rather have no global warming and no Nobel prize.”

Across the Atlantic at the same time, Manabe told the AP that figuring out the physics behind climate change was “1,000 times” easier than getting the world to do something about it.

But he noted that those two things were related: Without an understanding of why the climate is changing — which his pioneering work provided — predicting such change “is no better than the prediction of a fortune teller.”

The prize comes less than four weeks before the start of high-level climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland, where world leaders will be asked to ramp up their commitments to curb global warming.