Nobel Committee Honors Two Pioneers in Climate Physics

This year’s Nobel prize in physics is awarded - in part - to two climate scientists, who made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the climate system and its response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Their research marks a milestone in understanding, simulating, and detecting human-induced climate change.

Prize endeavours

Climate physics has at long last been recognized with a Nobel prize.

TRUE GLOBAL WARMING INFERRED FROM ALPINE RECESSIONAL MORAINES BY SCOTTISH PHYSICIST JOHN LESLIE IN 1796

ABSTRACT In 1796, Scottish physicist John Leslie visited the Swiss Alps seeking evidence in support of his theory that the entire Earth is slowly warming through the accumulation of absorbed solar radiation. He observed that parallel ridges of loose angular stones (moraines) become increasingly vegetated with distance from the margins of active glaciers, and he inferred the secular retreat of glacier margins by at least 3000 vertical feet. Leslie anticipated by four decades the discovery of a former Ice Age by geologists and, while his theory of climate change was faulty in being unaware of Earth's outgoing non-luminous (infra-red) radiation, his inference regarding glacial recession was robust. If not due to topographic lowering of the Alps, it was inexplicable to nineteenth century climate physics in the absence of an unexplained change in radiative forcing.

SCIENTIFIC PATH OF YU.A. IVANOV – THE OUTSTANDING RUSSIAN EXPERT-ENCYCLOPAEDIST IN THE FIELD OF OCEAN HYDROPHYSICS

The article contains a brief description of the main stages of scientific activity of the outstanding Russian scientist – oceanologist, versatile specialist in the field of marine hydrophysics – Yuri Alexandrovich Ivanov. This publication, as well as the entire issue of the journal «Oceanological research», dedicated to the memory of this wonderful man, who on October 10, 2019 would have turned 90 years old. Yu. A. Ivanov was born in 1929 in Jaroslavl, but most part of his life, after graduating in 1954 from the Leningrad Higher Marine College named after Admiral Stepan Osipovich Makarov, worked in Moscow, in the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Science. Here he went through all the stages of a scientist carrier from junior researcher to head of a large laboratory, defended his doctoral thesis, became a Professor, received the title of Honored Specialist of Science of Russia. His outstanding scientific achievements were awarded by the State prize of the USSR, also the most prestigious academic S.O. Makarov award in the field of Oceanology. Yu.A. Ivanov made a great contribution to the development of several major areas of the ocean Sciences. In this regard, he was a real encyclopaedist, one of the few in his scientific community, an outstanding expert scientist, who at the highest professional level was engaged in solving the problems of the General circulation of the World ocean, the Interaction of the ocean and atmosphere, Ocean climate, Physics of boundary layers and Wave processes in these two environments, General and particular problems of formation and evolution of the Hydrophysical regime of the ocean. Much attention, a lot of time and effort were dedicated by Yu.A. Ivanov to planning, organizing and conducting the field experiments in the real open ocean. He happened to be a participant of about 20 large sea expeditions, some of them were carried out under his direct supervision. Yuri Alexandrovich Ivanov was a brilliant scientist, kind, considerate, friendly person, cherishing the memory of him is with gratitude kept among his numerous students, colleagues, collaborators, friends and moons in distant sea voyages.

Trysts Tropiques: The Torrid Jungles of Science Fiction

In science fiction magazines of the first half of the twentieth century, tropical environments are chaotic domains where civilised restrictions do not apply. Visitors who cross the boundary between civilisation and jungle exhibit carnal desires and violent behaviours in response to the opportunities and threats they encounter. Mysterious cities and settlements hidden in the jungle and inhabited by supernatural beings are a common feature of science fiction of this period. The tropics are ‘torrid’ in both a human, emotional sense, as well as in the sense of Aristotle’s definition of a geographical area that is virtually uninhabitable due to the hostility of the climate (Physics, 362a33-362b29). However, by the end of the century, the tropical jungle had been transformed in science fiction into something positive and less fearsome; a rich ecological reserve, endangered, and in need of preservation. Tropical science fiction narratives reflect a changing public understanding of the tropics, and illustrate the value of science fiction as a record of the history of changes in social and cultural values.

Nitrous oxide emissions from soils: how well do we understand the processes and their controls?

Although it is well established that soils are the dominating source for atmospheric nitrous oxide (N 2 O), we are still struggling to fully understand the complexity of the underlying microbial production and consumption processes and the links to biotic (e.g. inter- and intraspecies competition, food webs, plant–microbe interaction) and abiotic (e.g. soil climate, physics and chemistry) factors. Recent work shows that a better understanding of the composition and diversity of the microbial community across a variety of soils in different climates and under different land use, as well as plant–microbe interactions in the rhizosphere, may provide a key to better understand the variability of N 2 O fluxes at the soil–atmosphere interface. Moreover, recent insights into the regulation of the reduction of N 2 O to dinitrogen (N 2 ) have increased our understanding of N 2 O exchange. This improved process understanding, building on the increased use of isotope tracing techniques and metagenomics, needs to go along with improvements in measurement techniques for N 2 O (and N 2 ) emission in order to obtain robust field and laboratory datasets for different ecosystem types. Advances in both fields are currently used to improve process descriptions in biogeochemical models, which may eventually be used not only to test our current process understanding from the microsite to the field level, but also used as tools for up-scaling emissions to landscapes and regions and to explore feedbacks of soil N 2 O emissions to changes in environmental conditions, land management and land use.