Nobel Prize in Physics Honors Work on Climate Change – The New York Times

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In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations, released a report showing that the nations of the world can no longer stop global warming from intensifying. The global average temperature will rise 2.7 degrees Celsius by century’s end even if all countries meet their promised emissions cuts under the Paris Agreement. That temperature rise is likely to bring more extreme wildfires, droughts and floods, according to a United Nations report released in September.

But that they have a short window in which to curb fossil-fuel emissions and prevent the worst future outcomes, and the IPCC report builds directly on the models pioneered by Dr. Manabe.

“The climate scientists of today stand on the shoulders of these giants, who laid the foundations for our understanding of the climate system,” said Ko Barrett, senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is also vice-chair of the IPCC.

Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University who also worked on the IPCC report, called Dr. Manabe a critical figure in the rise of climate science in the mid-1960s.

“He took the weather models that were beginning to emerge in the period after World World II and turned them into the first climate models,” he said.

Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in England, called Dr. Manabe’s 1967 paper detailing these models “arguably the greatest climate-science paper of all time.”

Dr. Barrett also hailed Dr. Hasselmann and Dr. Parisi for expanding on this work and praised the Nobel Committee for showing the world that today’s climate studies are grounded in decades of scientific work. “It is important to understand that climate science is built on basic foundations of physics,” she said.

Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/science/nobel-prize-physics-manabe-klaus-parisi.html

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