2021 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 5 October 2021.

The citation

Half of the prize goes jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann "for the physical modelling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming". Half of the prize goes to Giorgio Parisi "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales".

The laureates

Syukuro Manabe was born in 1931 in Shingu, Ehime, Japan, and is affiliated with Princeton University, Princeton. Klaus Hasselmann was born in 1931 in Hamburg, Germany, and is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg. Giorgio Parisi was born in 1948 in Rome, Italy, and is affiliated with Sapienza University of Rome, Rome.

Why it matters

Manabe and Hasselmann developed models of the Earth's climate that showed how rising carbon dioxide leads to warming. Parisi found hidden patterns in complex systems.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.