The Climate It’s A-Changin’ – The Economic Times

The Nobel Committee awarded the 2021 physics prize ‘for the physical modelling of Earth‘s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming’. Two of the three laureates – Klaus Hasselmann and Syukuro Manabe – pioneered climate modelling, from elegant conceptual explanations of observed climate properties to the comprehensive modelling based on numerical fluid dynamics used today. Climate modelling now transitions (almost) seamlessly from weather forecasting to decadal climate prediction and projection of future climate.

Modelling is our best window into the future. As such, it is a key element of understanding and mitigating climate change. Importantly, the award of the Nobel prize highlights that climate modelling is physics. This renders the question, ‘do you believe in global warming’, meaningless: whether the globe warms in response to greenhouse gas increases is determined by the physics of energy balance. It is not subject to belief systems. Through their scientific work, both Hasselmann and Manabe established the scientific foundation for concern about increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases, particularly the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere arising from the burning of fossil fuels.

The path of scientific enquiry they pioneered leads to the UN Climate Change Conferences of the Parties that seek to limit global climate change. The 26th meeting in the series, COP26, brought together world leaders in Glasgow in November 2021.

From ‘Climate Change is Physics’, researchgate.net