Speaker
Description
“Climate change is physics”; this was highlighted by the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics. Physically based models of the atmosphere and ocean, which have been developed since the mid 1960s, have predicted fingerprints of climate change that we now observe worldwide. Warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere, warming of the ocean, and the accelerating melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets leading to sea level rise are testimony to these changes that are unprecedented in human experience. In this lecture we recall some of the seminal research of two of the three laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021, and put them into the broader context of climate research carried out in physics. Taken together, the physical science basis has been essential, not only for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change but also for the Paris Agreement.
