Climate Change Society

Syukuro Manabe – awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics – demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth.

In the 1950s, Japanese atmospheric physicist Manabe was one of the young and talented researchers in Tokyo who left Japan, which had been devastated by war, and continued their careers in the US. The aim of Manabes’s research was to understand how increased levels of carbon dioxide can cause increased temperatures. He led work on the development of physical models to incorporate the vertical transport of air masses due to convection, as well as the latent heat of water vapour.

To make these calculations manageable, he chose to reduce the model to one dimension – a vertical column, 40 kilometres up into the atmosphere. Even so, it took hundreds of valuable computing hours to test the model by varying the levels of gases in the atmosphere. Oxygen and nitrogen had negligible effects on surface temperature, while carbon dioxide had a clear impact: when the level of carbon dioxide doubled, global temperature increased by over 2°C.

The model confirmed that this heating really was due to the increase in carbon dioxide, because it predicted rising temperatures closer to the ground while the upper atmosphere got colder. If variations in solar radiation were responsible for the increase in temperature instead, the entire atmosphere should have been heating at the same time.

Sixty years ago, computers were hundreds of thousands of times slower than they are now, so this model was relatively simple, but Manabe got the key features right. You must always simplify, he says. You cannot compete with the complexity of nature – there is so much physics involved in every raindrop that it would never be possible to compute absolutely everything. The insights from the one-dimensional model led to a climate model in three dimensions, which Manabe published in 1975; this was a milestone on the road to understanding the climate’s secrets.

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