Can anyone with more insight into the three researchers explain if this is a political statement or if their work really represents the best physics research? I am genuinely asking as I don't know much about their research.
Is it unreasonable to suggest that maybe it could be both a reflection of politics and world class scientific achievements?
To suggest that the prize is given simply in order to make a political statement seems like an insult to both the academy and the laureates. Besides, wouldn't it be just as bad to avoid awarding a prize that is politically sensitive, even though the actual science may well be prize worthy?
It's fine to not consider a laureate a worthy winner, for sure, but it's not like they gave the Nobel prize in physics to Greta Thunberg..
High profile prizes will always be political. That said, Syukuro Manabe built the foundation for a lot of modern day computer-based climate simulation. I can't speak for the others but I'd say that's Nobel worthy.
I don't know how you would meaningfully rank physicists without resorting to subjective value judgements. The notion of importance exists only in relationship to our ability to accomplish our goals, and goals are subjective.
I'm no scientist by any stretch of the imagination, the last time when I read something related to higher physics was ~20 years ago, in college, but I have to ask how is that topic related to modern physics. You're correct, it sounds like like a worthy Nobel for an Earth Sciences Nobel, or a Meteorology one (to be more direct), if those two things existed (maybe they should), but, again, don't know how meteorology (what computer-based climate simulation basically is) is the same thing as higher physics.
As a physicist, I try to avoid the snobbery of limiting myself to "higher physics". A wide variety of physical systems are interesting, not just fundamental particle physics. Physics contains multitudes; graphene, giant magnetoresistence, fiber optics, and systems more complex.
But then again physics risks following the (wrong) road taken by economics a while ago, when it decided that almost all modern human-activity can be in fact studied through the economics lens.
Surely studying the climate, i.e. a physical system, is completely in the realm of physics. Certainly, it is closer to whatever definition of physics you may have, than education or kidney donation (to take two examples) are to economics.
There is a level of politics that shreds credibility though. I am just struggling to see how someone gets a physics Nobel for modelling a climate system. Climate isn't new, climate models have been getting better for decades and will continue to. The work may be important and well done, but it doesn't sound like it is pushing the boundaries of physics.
Below is a quote from the press release we are discussing:
> 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.
As far as I understand (I am not a physicist), you're right: climate is not new, and climate models have been getting better for decades. And that's (in part) because of this guy's work, half a century ago. It sure pushed the boundaries of physics at the time, didn't it?
It doesn't sound like it from that tagline either, it makes it sound like he discovered that sunshine makes air move around. Which is also not news on the scale of the Physics nobel.
Obviously he discovered something a lot more noteworthy than that, but these one line summaries are doing a terrible job of hinting at what.
Manabe contributed many pivotal works to the broad domain of planetary and atmospheric physics in the 1960's. The word "model" in reference to his work is substantially more than just computer simulations; really, it's referring to some of his seminal contributions providing "models" in the sense of physical frameworks for understanding the responses and evolution of planetary atmospheres (broadly speaking - with relevance far beyond the terrestrial atmosphere) to particular forcings. See Manabe and Weatherald (1967) [1] for perhaps one of the most critical contributions that he made.
The Nobel Prize does not — and cannot reasonably — highlight the "best" physics research, because it is not possible to directly say one discipline is superior or more important than another. Rather, the Nobel features different disciplines in different years.
In this context, it's important to recall that the development of modern climate science is one of the most significant developments of 20th-century physics, and before this year, no Nobel Prize had been awarded for climate science. Similar prizes were awarded for the development of the integrated circuit and the light-emitting diode, and in these cases almost nobody finds it to be in the slightest untoward that the Prize is awarded in relation to the social impact of the work. (There are always a few crotchety purists, but more people pretend to be so when it suits them.)
So yes, awarding the Nobel for climate science is a political decision. Not awarding the Nobel for climate science would also be a political decision. In this context, it appears that the recipients are two of the most influential early theorists of climate science, who did their work decades ago.
The Nobel committee has no choice but to be politicized when science is politicized. They handled it admirably.
Politicizing it has almost nothing to do with whether or not it is believed, it is politicized when it has value on a political scale. Saying Country A has lower impact on the climate than Country B and therefore A should limit its production of weapons and infrastructure that rely on factories and industries that produce harmful chemicals is very obviously of value to a politician
> Imagine if scientists just "believed" science and never tried to reproduce.
You're mixing up scientists-as-individuals with scientists-as-a-whole.
Scientists-as-a-whole should certainly reproduce results, both to check new claims, and to teach/learn/demonstrate old knowledge.
Scientists-as-individuals need belief, since there's no way to indivudally reproduce everything. For example, climate models rely on decades of measurements from Earth-observation satellites; if scientist shouldn't "believe", how would they go about reproducing those measurements for themselves?
Even if individual climate scientists began each of their projects by building and launching their own satellites to take decades of observations (which would lag behind existing data, in any case), how would they calibrate the instruments on those satellites (e.g. without "believing" in the zeroth law of thermodynamics)?
In principle, every individual could spend 10 years to learn the subject, then comb trough the evidence in one particular detail. That's not possible in reality.
Even climate scientists have to trust other climate scientists in details they are not experts in. Climate chemist has not checked 3D computational model and vice versa.
It is said that Thomas Young (1773 – 1829) was the last man who knew everything. He was a polymath who had studied most of human knowledge in detail.
Isn’t that the problem? Because for most people, believing in it is the only option? They don’t have the tools or the ability to either refute nor confirm it.
No, verification is not belief. You can believe in the methodologies I suppose, but that is not what is being said when people say "believe in science". They are saying "believe in the findings from people you haven't met who have credentials", which is nothing more than a nonsense appeal to authority.
If a subject is important to someone, they should try their best to understand the research and to more fully understand a claim, one would do well to research with a heavy dose of skepticism in everything, especially things that affirm their own bias.
No, Gore merely made a movie that a lot of people saw, the politicisation (in the sense of wilfully ignoring science results for partisan reasons) was started in the 1990's by oil companies and republicans looking to kill they Kyoto protocol.
You can say so only if you believe that reality is constructed, like some French postmodernist philosophers do.
If you think there is some ground truth in hard sciences, and science community provides best approximation of it, then "other side too" argument is not valid. Al Gore educated, only climate dentists politicized.
Is a climate dentist (a) a typo (i.e., you meant denialist); (b) a clever reference to Seinfeld and anti-dentites; or (c) a valid phrase that I’m unfamiliar with?
Rather than reading what tech/science writers can summarize on a lap (remember, they only learned the laureates' names a hour ago or so), I prefer to simply head over to YouTube and look for a lecture given by a laureate themselves. Most likely, Nobel is not their first prize and they have given a lecture summarizing their lifetime contributions before. Plus, it's always more pleasure to listen to nice people than reading Twitter :)
It is obvious that the committee decided they wanted the prize to be about climate change this year before the selection process began, or it never would have shaken out this way.
I guess first stathibus defined that anything that indicates the reality of climate change is part of one big conspiracy, and then "obviously" this event is part of that?
> Looks like this part is political: “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”
All this is saying is that the predictive models they devised were proven correct given climate behavior today, e.g rise of temperatures and a general uptrend in severe weather activity that followed.
Taking a look at Syukuro Manabe on Google scholar, one will find that his most cited work is decades old. They could have given him the prize years ago or years from now. Climate change being the biggest topic currently certainly was a contributing factor to the decision.
That's how the scientific Nobel prizes work. The average delay between discovery and award for recent Physics prizes is over 25 years, and gaps of 40+ years are not uncommon.
The point your comment makes is one I imagine you have not grasped - the basic science of climate and CO2 was figured out by the late 1970s. Everything else since has been fine-tuning.
For example, if you go back to the early 1950s this was not well known, and you had theories about how variations in the tides controlled climate and so on.
P.S. Exxon scientists knew in 1978 that the science was accurate, and yet their executives spent millions of dollars for decades lying about it - and are still at it.
