Nobel dalam fisika: Terobosan ilmu iklim mendapatkan hadiah

Tiga ilmuwan telah dianugerahi Hadiah Nobel Fisika 2021 untuk pekerjaan mereka memahami sistem yang kompleks, seperti iklim Bumi.

Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann dan Giorgio Parisi diumumkan sebagai pemenang dalam sebuah acara di Stockholm.Penelitian oleh Manabe dan Hasselmann menghasilkan model komputer dari iklim bumi yang dapat memprediksi dampak pemanasan global.

Para pemenang akan berbagi hadiah uang sebesar 10 juta krona (£842.611).Sangat sulit untuk memprediksi perilaku jangka panjang dari sistem fisik yang kompleks seperti iklim. Oleh karena itu, model komputer yang mengantisipasi bagaimana ia akan merespons peningkatan emisi gas rumah kaca sangat penting untuk memahami pemanasan global sebagai keadaan darurat planet

Indeed, the award comes as world leaders are preparing for a critical UN climate conference, known as COP26, to be held in Glasgow this November. Asked about the timing, Prof Parisi said: "We have to act now in a very fast way and not with a strong delay."The climate models that have built on the winners' research form a crucial part of the evidence on which leaders at COP26 will base their decisions.

Japan-born Syukuro Manabe, 90, who is senior meteorologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the climate.

Roughly a decade later, Klaus Hasselmann, 89, from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, created a computer model that linked together weather and climate. His work answered the question of why climate models can be reliable despite weather being changeable and chaotic

Pada tingkat yang dangkal, karya asli yang dilakukan oleh Prof Parisi, yang saat ini berada di Universitas Sapienza Roma, tampaknya tidak banyak berhubungan dengan perubahan iklim.

Itu berkaitan dengan paduan logam yang disebut kaca spin, di mana atom besi dicampur secara acak ke dalam kisi atom tembaga. Meskipun hanya ada beberapa atom besi, mereka mengubah sifat magnetik material secara radikal dan sangat membingungkan.

But the Nobel Committee saw spin glass as a microcosm for the complex behaviour of the Earth's climate. Complex systems, on atomic and planetary scales, may share certain features, such as being chaotic and disordered, with behaviour that seems to be governed by chance.

Parisi, who is 73, found that hidden rules influence the apparently random behaviour of solid materials - and worked out a way to describe them mathematically.

Prof John Wettlaufer, a physicist at Yale University in New Haven, US, explained: "What emerged from the committee's work was the duality between the study of Earth's climate - which is complex on scales from millimetres to the size of the planet - and Giorgio Parisi's work.

The Italian physicist was "building from the disorder and fluctuations of complex systems at [the level of] their microscopic constituents", Prof Wettlaufer said. The work of Syukuro Manabe, on the other hand, "is taking the components of individual processes and knitting them together to predict the behaviour of a complex physical system".

Prof Hasselmann's work encompassed both the microscopic and macroscopic worlds, added the physicist from Yale.

"Even though we've divided the prize between the climate part and the disorder part, they really are linked," he explained.

Dr Martin Juckes, head of atmospheric science and research and deputy head of the UK's Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA), said: "It is fantastic to see the work of climate scientists rewarded with the Nobel prize in physics today. The problems of complexity in climate systems, compounded by threats of the climate crisis, continue to challenge climate scientists today."

This year's physics laureates were announced during a news conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. One half of the 10 million krona goes to Manabe and Hasselmann, while the other goes to Parisi.

The Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel founded the prizes in his will, written a year before his death in 1896.A total of 218 individuals have now won the physics prize since it was first awarded in 1901.

Only four of these laureates have been women. One physicist, John Bardeen, won the prize twice - in 1956 and 1972.