Expressive indications of climate researchers winning the Nobel Prize in Physics...

This content was published on Oct 05, 2021 – Jul 08:28,

October 05, 2021 – 08:28

(AFP)
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Tuesday to two experts in the physical modeling of climate change, Japanese-American Shokuro Manabe and German Klaus Haselmann, along with Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Baresi.

Despite the fact that the award is scientific in nature, its award for research related to climate change acquires expressive connotations, given that it comes in the midst of mounting alarm about the acceleration of climate change, and a month before the Conference of Parties on Climate (COP26) hosted by Glasgow.

Meteorologists Haselman, 89, and Manabe, who was born in Japan 90 years ago but lives in the United States, won half of the first prize for “physical modeling of the Earth’s climate, to measure its fluctuations and to reliably predict climate warming,” according to the jury.

The Nobel Committee rewarded Manabe’s groundbreaking work in the 1960s on the greenhouse effect, which showed that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere correspond to rising global temperatures.

As for Haselmann, who resides in the German city of Hamburg, he was rewarded for his creation of reliable climate models despite the great weather fluctuations.

The Italian Baresi, 73, won the other half of the prize for “discovering the interaction of chaos and fluctuations in physical systems from the atomic scale to the planetary scale.”

Parisi’s difficult work constituted one of the “most important contributions” to the so-called “complex systems theory”.

The Swedish Academy of Sciences explained that “this year the award rewards new ways to describe (these systems) and predict their long-term behavior.”

– Upside down-

And the Nobel Prize for Physics last year was crowned by three pioneers in the field of research related to “black holes”, which are regions of the universe with supergravity from which no particles can escape, they are the British Roger Penrose, the German Reinhard Gunzel and the American Andrea Geis.

The experts identified by Agence France-Presse considered the two quantum physicists the winners and Baresi among the front-runners this year, even if dozens of researchers from all over the world are considered eligible to win the Nobel Prize in physics.

According to an unchanging order of award distribution, the announcement of the Nobel Prize winners began on Monday with the awarding of the Medicine Prize to the American scientist David Julius and his compatriot of Lebanese-Armenian descent, Erdem Patabutian, in recognition of their discoveries about the way the nervous system transmits signals associated with heat and touch, which opened the way for the treatment of chronic pain.

Hungarian Katalin Kariko and American Drew Weissman, whose names were proposed for the Medicine Prize, may have a second chance when the chemistry award is announced on Wednesday, as their pioneering research directly led to the first vaccines based on messenger RNA technology, and their published discoveries paved the way for the development of the Pfizer/Biontech and Moderna vaccines against the virus. Corona.

As for the literature prize, which the Swedish Academy will announce the name of the winner on Thursday, it is possible, according to experts who spoke to Agence France-Presse, that the winner will be non-Western, for the first time in nearly ten years, before the announcement on Friday in Oslo of the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are many nominations for the Peace Prize, and it is the only one to be awarded in Oslo, and among the most fortunate are the organizations that fight for media freedom and the rights of journalists, such as Reporters Without Borders, the Association to Protect Journalists, and the Belarusian opposition, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

The season concludes Monday with the Economics Prize, the latest category to be created.

For the second year in a row, winners will have to receive their prizes in the countries in which they reside due to the health crisis, although there is little hope that the Nobel Peace Prize winner will come to Norway.