The 2021 “Complex systems” Nobel prize:The climate, with and without
geocomplexity
Abstract
One half of this year’s Nobel Physics prize was awarded to statistical
physicist Giorgio Parisi and the other - the first ever in geophysics -
to climate scientists Syukoro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann, the former
for pioneering General Circulation Models (GCMs) 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 climate laureates’ work almost exclusively
from the 1960’s and 70’s. We update their report with the contributions
from nonlinear geophysics and discuss the implications for the unity of
geoscience.