Irish Examiner view: Warm applause for physicists

Climate change recognition

Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Goran Hansson, center, flanked at left by member of the Nobel Committee for Physics Thors Hans Hansson, and member of the Nobel Committee for Physics John Wettlaufer, right, announces the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, Sweden. Picture: AP

It is appropriate in the month that the Cop26 summit meets to make fundamental decisions about global warming that the Nobel Prize for physics should be shared by two scientists who have been studying climate change for many decades and long before, in modern parlance, it became a thing.

Klaus Hasselmann, 89, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and the Japanese-American Syukuro Manabe, 90, of Princeton University in New Jersey “laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it" said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.