The 2021 “Complex Systems” Nobel Prize: The Climate, With and Without Geocomplexity

Abstract

Abstract One half of 2021s Nobel Physics prize was awarded to statistical physicist Giorgio Parisi and the other—the first in geophysics in 75 years—to climate scientists Syukoro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann, the former for pioneering General Circulation Models and the latter (primarily) for proposing a statistical model explaining the climate as a slowly varying state driven by random weather noise. However, the Nobel committee recognized the climate laureates' work almost exclusively from the 1960s and 1970s. We update their report with the contributions from nonlinear geophysics and discuss the implications for the unity of geoscience, and for future climate modeling.

Keywords

• climate
• Nobel prize
• geocomplexity
• nonlinear geophysics
• scaling