8 November 2021 – by Deniz Saygi
Regarding his work of climate change models that provide help for predicting the impact of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane etc.) on climate change, Syukuro Manabe, a senior meteorologist at Princeton University, won the Nobel Prize in Physics (along with Klaus Hasselmann, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, and Giorgio Parisi, a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome).
Using a high-speed computer in the 1960s, Mr Manabe has developed physical models which predicted that if the level of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere doubles, the global surface temperature increases by 2.36 C. In 1989, he gained success in developing a model for the scientific predictions about global warming by involving the weather conditions of the atmosphere, ocean and land. Manabe also led a research team concerning global warming and climate change in Japan for four years beginning from 1997.
Highlighting the difficulty of carrying out the experiments to classify the problems and their status, Syukuro Manabe underlines the significance of the scientific predictions to fight against global warming and climate change. Since his numerical modelling system predicts and investigates how the Earth’s surface temperatures are influenced by atmospheric conditions and the Earth’s complex climate systems, Syukuro Manabe’s ideas and works are foundational for all modern climate researches that have been ongoing.
“Climate [policy] involves not only the environment but also energy, agriculture, water and just about everything you can imagine. I never imagined that this thing I was beginning to study [would have] such huge consequences,” Mr Manabe said during the conference after winning the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics.
