Climate change is like the wings of a butterfly. The warming of the equatorial Pacific may cause rainy summers in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in my country.
This year's Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to scientists who have made outstanding contributions in the field of climate change.
The Nobel Prize Agency awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics to three scientists on Tuesday in recognition of their pioneering work in predicting climate change and understanding complex physical systems.
The three scientists are Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe, German scientist Klaus Hasselmann, and Italian scientist Giorgio Parisi.
Among them, Shuro Manabe and Hasel won awards for "physical models of the Earth's climate, quantified variables and reliable predictions of global warming"; Parisian "discovered the interaction of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems ranging from atomic to planetary scales" "Awarded.
First Prize in Physics for Climate Science
Unlike the two relatively young scientists who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology on October 4, the youngest winner of this year’s Physics Prize is the 75-year-old Italian Parisi. Both Manabe Shuro and Haselman have They are 90 and 89 years old.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated in a statement that Manabe's work in the 1960s "layed the foundation for the development of current climate models," and Hasselman "created a model that links weather and climate."
Parisi's discovery "makes it possible to understand and describe many different and seemingly random complex substances and phenomena."
Their work is not only applicable to physics, but also to other fields such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience, and machine learning.
The Nobel Prize in Physics is usually awarded to basic physics workers. This time the award to the pioneers of physical system models also surprised the industry.
But given that the issue of climate warming has become a topic of global concern, this year's Physics Prize also reflects the value of climate research work.
Li Xichen, a researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told a reporter from China Business News: “This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists involved in the simulation of the Earth’s climate system. This is not only unexpected, but also desirable. The unexpected is because of this. Prior to the Nobel Prize in Physics, he had never shown interest in climate science. Many people may think that climate science is not physics in the traditional sense."
Li Xichen said that the two previous awards related to climate and environment were the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1995 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for intergovernmental climate cooperation.
"The general expectation is that climate system science, earth system simulation, and related chaotic disciplines not only involve difficult knowledge of physics and mathematics, but also have had a huge impact on our daily lives and will definitely change the future. world."
Li Xichen further explained that the surface of the earth on which humans live, including the land, atmosphere, oceanosphere, lithosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, etc., is a complex nonlinear system that blends and interacts with each other.
Although the motion and thermal processes of most of the particles (or local air or water masses) in the atmosphere and ocean follow relatively simple laws of physics, the billions of particles (or local) in these systems have always interacted and interacted with each other. Influence, a non-linear "chaotic system" is formed.
"The butterfly effect we are familiar with and the three-body motion are good examples of chaotic systems." Li Xichen said, "Generally speaking, chaotic systems are difficult to predict, but our earth system is in a complex and non-linear context. , It also implies some interesting laws that make us theoretically have the possibility of predicting the future of a certain aspect of the earth."
How to predict the future of the earth?
The International Climate Association has defined climate change, which is the change caused by some variables caused by climate in a specific place and within a standard time. The standard time generally refers to 30 years.
Since the 1970s, scientists have fairly accurately predicted the degree of world warming, and a large part of short-term meteorological disasters can also be predicted.
These achievements should be attributed to scientists including Shuro Manabe.
Manabe Shuro has been experimenting with numerical simulations of the Earth's climate system since the 1960s and 70s.
The climate model developed by him and his colleagues in the 1980s and 1990s has been able to simulate the Earth's feedback on the radiative forcing caused by different greenhouse gas concentrations.
"Simply put, it is to be able to simulate the changes in the temperature and precipitation of the earth's surface under different greenhouse gas concentrations in the future. The simulation results of these climate models are important sciences for us to predict climate change and formulate countermeasures. Basis." Li Xichen told China Business News reporter.
He added that there are many scientists in our country who have done a lot of work on earth system simulation.
“my country’s highest science and technology award winner Zeng Qingcun has started to build our own climate numerical model since the 1960s, and it has been developed to this day.” Li Xichen said, “In this summer, my country built a large earth system numerical simulation device-Huanhuan in Huairou Science City. It is also an advanced earth system model in the world today."
Nowadays, the Earth system model plays a very important role in the research and prediction of the mechanism of climate change and variability. It can not only simulate the average surface condition under different greenhouse gas concentrations, but also can well simulate the changes in the earth’s orbit, Volcanic eruptions, anthropogenic aerosols, and internal variability of the climate system have an impact on the global climate and environment.
"Especially in the prediction and prediction of extreme events (such as extreme rain, extreme high temperature, cold waves, flood disasters, strong typhoons, etc.), local climate change, interannual and interdecadal climate variability, etc. are also playing more and more important It also provides important scientific support for us to formulate strategies to deal with climate change." Li Xichen said.
However, some scientists questioned that the work connections of the three winners of this year's Physics Prize are not so close. The Nobel Prize awarded to scientists in two different fields may be "patch together".
In this regard, popular science writer Zhang Xuanzhong told the CBN reporter: “The contributions of these three scientists are interrelated to a certain extent, because they are all so-called complex systems, and their main research is chaos, which is the so-called butterfly effect and others. Related physical phenomena, including atmospheric physics, so their work is still connected to a certain extent, but the correlation is not particularly strong."