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Nobel Physics Prize: Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi honoured for climate discoveries
- Nobel Physics Prize winners announced day after two US scientists were awarded the medicine prize
- More than century-old prize was endowed by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel
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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 modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.”
The second half of the prize was awarded to Giorgio Parisi of Italy for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”
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All three work on what are known as “complex systems,” of which climate is just one example.
The judges said Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, “laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how human actions influence it.
Starting in the 1960s, Manabe demonstrated how increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures, laying the foundations for current climate models.
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