Nobel laureate Hasselmann says 'we've been warning against climate change for 50 years'

Nobel Laureate Klaus Hasselmann on October 5 said that scientists have been warning against climate change for about five decades. Just minutes after the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Hasselmann is one of the three recipients of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, the German scientist said that he is “completely surprised” on receiving the award. As per the audio of the telephonic interview released by the official Twitter account of the Nobel Prize, he called receiving the honour a “bolt from the blue” and added,- “I can’t understand this.”

While talking about the “most urgent” thing to be done to tackle climate change, Hasselmann said that the most urgently needed is “some action against climate change. I mean, many things we can do to prevent climate change and this is a whole question of whether people will realise that something which will happen in 20 or 30 years is something which you have to respond to now. And that’s the main problem with climate change.”

Hasselmann along with Syukuro Manabe won Nobel Prize “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.” While one half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Giorgia Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales,” the other half is jointly awarded to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann. 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement that all three laureates received the award for “their studies of chaotic and apparently random phenomena.” The academy said, “Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it. Giorgio Parisi is rewarded for his revolutionary contributions to the theory of disordered materials and random processes.”

'We Have To Act Now'

One of the recipients of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, Laureate Giorgio Parisi recently spoke about the current situation of climate change on October 5. During the Nobel Prize press conference on Tuesday, Parisi said, “It’s clear that for the future generation, we have to act now in a very fast way.” 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that around 1980, Giorgio Parisi discovered the hidden patterns in the disordered complex materials decades after Hasselmann and Manabe revealed their findings. Parisi’s discoveries, as per the official release, are “the most important contributions to the theory of complex systems.” 

IMAGE: mpimet.mpg.de/AP