“Thanks to Manaba, we were able to model the climate and assess the human impact on it.” For what was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics

The Nobel Prize was given for the development of technologies that make possible the tools with which data on climate change has been generated. Figuratively speaking, the prize was awarded not for the discovery of microorganisms, but for the discovery of a microscope – for how we study climate change and the entire climate system.

We can see the results of the winning study with our own eyes. This is not just a climate change scenario that is somewhere far away. When you open your smartphone and see the weather forecast in any of the applications, the results of hydrodynamic models of the atmosphere are protected there – it is for their development that the award was awarded.

Manabe and his colleagues, now 90 years old, have created a technique for modeling the atmosphere and the ocean. Before them, the climate system was studied at a qualitative level, but the first atmospheric models, which predict weather and make climate predictions, were created by Nobel Prize winners.

We now know that ocean warming will trigger the release of carbon dioxide and create a chain reaction of melting ice – this is all a product of research by the current laureates. Here is the example of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. Now we all understand that consciousness works differently, but without Freud’s research, most likely, science would not have moved in the right direction. If we take theoretical physics, then it is like the discovery of quantum mechanics, when the opportunity arose to look at new physics. This gave, among other things, the opportunity for the emergence of the theory of relativity. Manabe is one of the founders of modern computational climatology, which not only describes what kind of climate exists where, but can also provide tools for modeling and transforming the climate system.

Any calculations on the topic of climate became possible in the post-war years. They were carried out in the 20s of the twentieth century, but then the entire computing arsenal was reduced to a person with an adding machine, and the solution of differential equations by a machine was impossible. When they became possible, humanity suddenly returned to the tasks that were posed earlier, but their solution was unattainable. Relatively speaking, when we have a quantum computer, we will think about solving those problems that previously seemed insoluble to us. Here the development of the methods of mathematical physics and the progress of computer technology simply coincided. All the mathematics of processes was described much earlier, just then there was no method to quickly calculate it and adapt the existing equations for computational technologies.

Why, within the framework of the Nobel Prize, meteorological research and oceanological research were combined is quite understandable. The point is that the theory of the climate system is very closely related to the theories of chaos. There are some commonalities in solving these problems. It should be said that it was on the basis of the Manabe models that the first calculations were made as to whether anthropogenic impact could affect the Earth’s climate.