'We have to act now': Nobel Prize winner Giorgio Parisi speaks about climate change

One of the recipients of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics, Laureate Giorgio Parisi revently 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.” From Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, Parisi won one of the most prestigious awards “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”

While one half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Parisi, the other half is jointly awarded to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.” 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.”

What did Giorgio Parisi discover?

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.” His studies make it possible to understand as well as describe many different and apparently entirely random materials and phenomena, “not only in physics but also in other, very different areas, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.”

Meanwhile, the Nobel Prize academy noted that Manabe’s discovered the complex system for the importance of humankind to the Earth’s climate. The laureate demonstrated "how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth."

In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the Earth’s climate and was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for the development of current climate models.” Additionally, a decade after Manabe’s discovery, Hasselmann created a model that connects the weather to the climate. With this, Hasselmann answered the question of why climate models can be “reliable despite the weather being changeable and chaotic.” 

IMAGE: Twitter/AP