Most people have heard the term “climate models” at least once. In every debate about climate change, they show up somewhere in the conversation. People quote them, doubt them, defend them, and argue over what they predict. However, very few people know the scientist who made climate modeling scientific in the first place.
His name is Syukuro Manabe.
A Nobel Prize that Defined a Field
When Manabe won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021, it wasn’t for a theory or a concept. It was because he proved that you can take the physics of greenhouse gases, put it into a computer, and accurately simulate how Earth’s climate responds to rising CO₂ levels.
Before Manabe, climate science could describe global warming. After Manabe, it could calculate it.
Building the First Real Climate Models
Manabe began developing climate models in the 1960s at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. Computers were extremely limited, but the principle was sound: if you simulate the atmosphere layer by layer—not as a single block—you can see how added CO₂ redistributes heat.
His early models produced the first clear result that still stands as proof today: when CO₂ increases, the lower atmosphere warms and the upper atmosphere cools.
Years later, satellite measurements confirmed that exact pattern.
Why His Work Still Shapes Every Model Today
The modern global climate models used by NASA, the UK Met Office, ECMWF, and research institutions across the world are built on Manabe’s structural approach. His work opened the door to answering questions with numbers:
- How sensitive the climate is to CO₂ increases
- How the oceans absorb and store heat long-term
- How water vapor amplifies warming
He didn’t just build models. He laid the mathematical foundation for climate prediction.
Manabe’s Nobel Prize recognized something important: climate modeling is physics. The greenhouse effect is a measurable, testable energy balance problem.
Fourier, Foote, Tyndall, and Arrhenius discovered what the greenhouse effect is. Manabe proved what happens when humans disturb it.
Want to learn more about people like Manabe, Foote, Tyndall, Fourier, and the other pioneers who uncovered how Earth’s climate actually works?
Freed From the Iron Grip of Frost takes you through the history of the greenhouse effect from the very beginning — showing how discoveries, measurements, and scientific breakthroughs over 200 years built the climate science we rely on today.
Grab your copy now.
