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.
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..
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.
The tag line sells it really poorly.
> 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?
Obviously he discovered something a lot more noteworthy than that, but these one line summaries are doing a terrible job of hinting at what.
[1]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...
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.
ps. Climate science is political only because those who don't believe in science politicize it.
Imagine if scientists just "believed" science and never tried to reproduce. Belief is an awfully terrible trait to have in science.
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.
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.
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.
And this part is actual science: “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”
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.
before you ask me for sources, you haven't provided any, and you're quoting from a release with sources.
Less "politics" and more "hey his models were right."
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.