This year’s Nobel Prize in physics is shared by two pioneering scientists whose research led to the first reliable predictions of global warming and a third who extended the emerging understanding of climate to other complex physical systems.
Syukuro “Suki” Manabe of Princeton University in the US, and Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany worked during the 1960s and 1970s to lay the foundations for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate.
The idea of the “greenhouse effect” — that adding carbon dioxide would warm up the atmosphere — dates back to the 19th century. But Manabe, who is 90, and Hasselmann, 89, converted it into realistic computer models of the way human activities affect climate.