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Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, and Giorgio Parisi are to be awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on complex systems, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Tuesday.

Manabe, of Princeton University, developed a one-dimensional climate model to investigate the balance of incoming radiation from the Sun, IR from Earth, convection in the atmosphere, and the latent heat of water vapor. His 1967 framework verified that carbon dioxide was the primary source of rising global temperatures. About a decade later, Hasselmann (Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany) created a stochastic climate model that incorporated the weather’s fluctuations as noise. In it, the fingerprints of individual influences on the climate can be identified and extracted, including the impact of humans.

Parisi (Sapienza University of Rome) tackled the spin glass problem- How do magnetic spins orient themselves when subjected to competing energetic and geometric constraints? His solution, which found patterns in the possible configurations, has influenced mathematics, biology, neuroscience, and machine learning.

Manabe and Hasselmann will share half the 10 million Swedish krona (roughly $1.1 million) prize; Parisi will receive the other half.