Nobel physics prize goes to 3 for climate discoveries

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for work that found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change. Syukuro Manabe, originally from Japan, and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany were cited for their work in "the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming."The second half of the prize was awarded to Giorgio Parisi of Italy for "the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales."All three work on what are known as "complex systems," of which climate is just one example.

The prize goes to two distinct types of physics that are opposite in many ways but share the goal of making sense of what seems random and chaotic in such a way that it can be predicted. Parisi's work centers around subatomic particles and is somewhat esoteric and academic, while the work by Manabe and Hasselmann is about large-scale global forces that shape our daily lives.The judges said Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, "laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth's climate and how human actions influence it.