Klaus Hasselmann

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Klaus Ferdinand Hasselmann (born October 25, 1931 in Hamburg ) is a German climate researcher , meteorologist and oceanologist . From 1975 to 1999 he was director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. In 2021 Hasselmann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi .

Life

Hasselmann was born in Hamburg in 1931 . His father was the economist, publicist and publisher Erwin Hasselmann , who had been politically committed to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the Weimar Republic from the 1920s . As politically persecuted by the Nazi regime , his father emigrated with his family to the United Kingdom in 1934 , where they received support from the Quakers after they entered the country and his father began working as a journalist. Klaus Hasselmann grew up in Welwyn Garden City in circles of German Jewish refugees and emigrants and returned for a final exam (Cambridge Higher School Certificate) in August 1949 in the then divided Germany to Hamburg. He has identified English as his first mother tongue. In 1949/50 he completed a mechanical engineering internship at Menck & Hambrock in Hamburg.

From 1950 to 1955 Hasselmann studied physics and mathematics at the University of Hamburg with a diploma in physics in 1955 under the fluid mechanic Karl Wieghardt with a thesis on turbulence and from 1955 to 1957 at the Max Planck Institute for Fluid Dynamics under Walter Tollmien at the Georg- August University of Göttingen with the dissertation on a method for determining the reflection and refraction of shock fronts and any waves of small wavelengths at the interface between two media . He was a research assistant to Karl Wieghardt at the Institute for Shipbuilding at the University of Hamburg (1957–1961) and assistant, later Associate Professor at the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla (1961 -1964). In February 1963 he completed his habilitation at the University of Hamburg and was a lecturer at the Hamburg University.

From 1966 Hasselmann was Professor and later Director of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of Hamburg and 1967/68 visiting professor at the University College of the University of Cambridge . He was department head and professor at Hamburg University (1969–1972) and at the same time held the Doherty Professorship at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts (1970–1972). In 1972 he was appointed full professor for theoretical geophysics and later appointed director at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Hamburg. From 1975 to November 1999 he was director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and from 1988 to 1999 scientific director at the German Climate Computing Center in Hamburg. Mojib Latif was one of his PhD students .

He has been married to the mathematician Susanne Hasselmann-Barthe, a former scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, since 1957 and has three children, including the virologist Dorothee Holm-von Laer .

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In the 1960s, Hasselmann also researched stochastic nonlinear interactions of ocean waves (and other wave phenomena in geophysics), which he treated in perturbation theory with the method of Feynman graphs . In 1976 he developed a stochastic climate model (Hasselmann model) in which random fluctuations similar to Brownian motion (and exactly as described there with the Langevin equation or its extensions) ensure the variability of the climate.

In the science of global warming , he is the author who received the most references per publication from 1991 to August 2001. Hasselmann made a number of significant scientific contributions to climate research. Among other things, he developed scientific methods with which the specific fingerprints of natural phenomena and human activities on the climate system can be determined. These methods were then used by climate researchers to prove that global warming was largely caused by anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. His 1979 publication On the signal-to-noise problem in atmospheric response studies is viewed in retrospect as a crucial step in demonstrating human influence on global warming. The climate researcher Benjamin D. Santer , who worked at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology headed by Hasselmann in the 1990s, said that the work was “far ahead of its time”, so much so that he did not understand it at the time . The core idea behind this work, which was inspired by signal processing , was that climate researchers as well as communications engineers are faced with the problem of detecting a signal from the noise in the data (caused by internal variability in climate research), i.e. external influences on the climate system such as the sun, volcanic activity or man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Although such methods for separating signals and noise had already been developed, they were initially largely unknown to climate research.

Hasselmann also contributed to the drafting of the first , second and third assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC) .

Hasselmann also dealt with economic models. In the 1990s he developed a model of elementary particles, which he called the “metron” model, inspired by his preoccupation with nonlinear waves, as solitons in Kaluza-Klein theories , where quantum mechanics is described deterministically as a theory of hidden variables . In 2021 he declared that he was still partially active as a physicist, whereby it was still particularly important to him to revolutionize physics. In particular, finding the so-called world formula continues to be a "life's work" for him .

Together with Syukuro Manabe , he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021 “for groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of complex physical systems”, specifically “for the physical modeling of the earth's climate , the quantitative analysis of variations and the reliable prediction of global warming ”. The two share half of the prize, the other half went to Giorgio Parisi .

Warnings about climate change

Hasselmann warned of global warming and its consequences as early as the 1980s . For example, in 1988 he said:

“In 30 to 100 years, depending on how much fossil fuel we consume, we will face a very significant climate change. Climatic zones will shift, precipitation will be distributed differently. Then you will no longer be able to talk about random results. One should become aware that we are entering a situation where there is no turning back. Above all, we must try to use oil and coal sparingly, because carbon dioxide is largely to blame for the greenhouse effect. "

He also praised the climate movement around Fridays for Future for their work against climate change. He thinks it's great that Fridays for Future has managed to find a way to address the public and thus achieve something that scientists had not been able to do before. The concerns of young people are justified against the background of the consequences of global warming that are already occurring. Nevertheless, he remains optimistic that it will be possible to get away from further greenhouse gas emissions and instead switch to natural energy sources. The use of renewable energies has been known for a long time. Thanks to Fridays for Future, his research is up to date again today. He also praised the climate activist Greta Thunberg . Thunberg has managed to "make the importance of climate change with all its dangers publicly aware."

Awards and honors

Memberships in scientific societies

Fonts (selection)

  • Tim Barnett et al .: Detecting and Attributing External Influences on the Climate System: A Review of Recent Advances . In: Journal of Climate . tape 18 , no. 9 , 2005, pp. 1291-1314 , doi : 10.1175 / JCLI3329.1 .
  • Klaus Hasselmann et al .: The Challenge of Long-Term Climate Change . In: Science . tape 302 , no. 5652 , 2003, p. 1923–1925 , doi : 10.1126 / science.1090858 .
  • Klaus Hasselmann: Climate change: Linear and nonlinear signatures . In: Nature . tape 398 , 1999, pp. 755-756 , doi : 10.1038 / 19635 .
  • Klaus Hasselmann: Climate-change research after Kyoto . In: Nature . tape 390 , 1997, pp. 225-226 , doi : 10.1038 / 36719 .
  • Klaus Hasselmann: Are We Seeing Global Warming? In: Science . tape 276 , no. 5314 , 1997, pp. 914-915 , doi : 10.1126 / science.276.5314.914 .
  • Klaus Hasselmann: Multi-pattern fingerprint method for detection and attribution of climate change . In: Climate Dynamics . tape 13 , 1997, pp. 601-611 , doi : 10.1007 / s003820050185 .
  • GJ Komen, L. Cavaleri, M. Donelan, K. Hasselmann, S. Hasselmann, PAEM Janssen: Dynamics and Modeling of Ocean Waves , Cambridge University Press 1994
  • Klaus Hasselmann: Optimal Fingerprints for the Detection of Time-dependent Climate Change . In: Journal of Climate . tape 6 , no. 10 , 1993, p. 1957-1971 , doi : 10.1175 / 1520-0442 (1993) 006 <1957: OFFTDO> 2.0.CO; 2 .
  • Klaus Hasselmann: On the signal-to-noise problem in atmospheric response studies . In: DB Shaw (Ed.), Meteorology over the Tropical Oceans, Royal Meteorological Society . 1979, p. 251-259 .
  • Claude Frankignoul, Klaus Hasselmann: Stochastic climate models, Part II Application to sea-surface temperature anomalies and thermocline variability . In: Tellus . tape 29 , no. 4 , 1977, pp. 289-305 , doi : 10.3402 / tellusa.v29i4.11362 .
  • Klaus Hasselmann: Stochastic climate models, Part 1 . In: Tellus . tape 28 , no. 6 , 1976, p. 473-485 , doi : 10.3402 / tellusa.v28i6.11316 .
  • Klaus Hasselmann: On the spectral dissipation of ocean waves due to white capping . In: Boundary-Layer Meteorology . tape 6 , 1974, p. 107-127 , doi : 10.1007 / BF00232479 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Klaus Hasselmann Facts nobelprize.org, October 5, 2021
  2. ↑ Klaus Hasselmann. In: aip.org. February 5, 2015, accessed October 6, 2021 .
  3. ↑ "I've been a little lazy lately"
  4. ^ CV from his website at the Max Planck Institute
  5. ↑ Klaus Hasselmann in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  6. ↑ Wanderer between the worlds - the new Nobel laureate in physics, Klaus Hasselmann. In: www.nzz.ch. Retrieved October 6, 2021 .
  7. ^ Nobel laureate Klaus Hasselmann: Climate modeller and formerly Mahner. October 5, 2021, accessed October 6, 2021 .
  8. ^ Nobel laureate Hasselmann: Formerly Mahner , zeit.de , October 5, 2021
  9. ↑ Klaus Hasselmann. In: mpimet.mpg.de. Retrieved October 6, 2021 .
  10. ^ Hasselmann: Feynman diagrams and interaction rules of wave-wave scattering processes . In: Reviews of Geophysics , Vol. 4, No. 1, 1966, pp. 1-32
  11. ↑ Essential Science Indicators: ( Memento of November 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Global Warming, Top 25 over all
  12. ↑ a b Naomi Oreskes , Erik M. Conway : Die Machiavellis der Wissenschaft (Original: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming). Weinheim 2014, p. 250.
  13. ↑ a b Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
  14. ↑ BD Santer et al .: Celebrating the anniversary of three key events in climate change science . In: Nature Climate Change , 9, 2019, pp. 180-182, doi: 10.1038 / s41558-019-0424-x
  15. ↑ News comment attributable to the Chair of IPCC Hoesung Lee . IPCC press release. Retrieved October 6, 2021.
  16. ^ The metron model: Elements of a unified deterministic theory of fields and particles . MPI Report 172, Hamburg 1995, arxiv : quant-ph / 9606033
  17. ↑ Hasselmann's page on the Metron model at the MPI
  18. ↑ a b "Here it was too Bavarian for us": Nobel Prize winner reveals how he ended up in the Munich area . In: Münchner Merkur , October 9, 2021. Retrieved October 9, 2021.
  19. ^ Another Nobel Prize in Physics for Germans . In: Tagesschau.de , October 5, 2021. Retrieved October 6, 2021.
  20. ^ Physics Nobel Prize Winner Hasselmann from Hamburg . In: Die Zeit , October 5, 2021. Retrieved October 6, 2021.
  21. ↑ egu.eu
  22. ↑ Members: Geosciences. Klaus Hasselmann. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, accessed November 20, 2015 .
  23. ↑ a b c d e f g Klaus Hasselmann. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, accessed on October 5, 2021 .
  24. ↑ Directory of members: Klaus Hasselmann. Academia Europaea, accessed June 28, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Hasselmann, Klaus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hasselmann, Klaus Ferdinand (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German climate researcher, meteorologist and oceanologist
BIRTH DATE October 25, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg