On 5 October – in a way just in time for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held from 31 October to 12 November – the three winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics were announced: two of them received it because of their work on fields related to Climate Change: Dr. Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University, USA, and Dr. Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, Germany. They share half of the prize, the other half goes to Dr. Giorgio Parisi of the Sapienza University, in Rome, Italy, who discovered rules that govern apparently random phenomena – which help also to explain some complex systems of the earth’s climate. They laid the foundations of the modeling of the earth’s climate that led to “quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.”
It is encouraging to see that the Nobel Nobel Committee, in implementing the will of Alfred Nobel, who created the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded to ”those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” These three winners have studied “complex, chaotic and apparently random systems, and developed ways to predict their long-term behavior related to climate change.”
To contribute to facing global climate change is a benefit to humankind.
Dr. Manabe, who is a meteorologist and not a physicist, did not expect this:
“I was really happy and surprised. I never dreamed I would win the Nobel Physics prize. If you look at the list of past winners, they are amazing people who have done marvelous work. In contrast, what I have been doing looks trivial to me.
“In the early 1960’s, we developed a radiative-convective model of the atmosphere, and explored the role of greenhouse gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide and ozone in maintaining and changing the thermal structure of the atmosphere. This was the beginning of the long-term research on global warming, which I have continued until now.
“In the late 1960’s, Kirk Bryan and I began to develop a general circulation model of the coupled atmosphere-ocean-land system, which eventually became a very powerful tool for the simulation of Global warming. Furthermore, we have realized that a coupled model simulates well the low frequency variability of climate. This has encouraged us to use a coupled model for exploring not only global warming but also unforced, natural variability of climate from seasonal to centennial time scales.
“Climate [policy] involves not only environment but also energy, agriculture, water, and just everything you can imagine. When these major problems in society are all interwoven with each other, you can understand how difficult it is to sort this thing out.
“Already, as you know, there are many phenomena showing climate change is happening. And I think that is the reason why the theme of climate change was selected for the award this time.”
But Dr. Manabe sees that there are enormous problems to be solved: asked how he would address climate change skeptics, he smiled and replied: “That problem is about a million times more difficult than understanding climate change. It is very mysterious to me.”
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It is interesting to see that both Dr Manabe and Dr. Hasselmann are fairly old: 90 and 89 years; they worked with consistency over many decades, but what they did is only now recognized: the activities in nature they studied are now broadly seen as life and dead question for the future of life on the earth.
Dr. Manabe earned his doctorate from the University of Tokyo before he moved to the USA.