The 2021 physics Nobel upholds the grim truths of climate science

When Syukuro Manabe was working on his PhD at the University of Tokyo, late in the 1950s, he was part of a team that tried to predict rainfall. The team’s methods now seem painstaking and rudimentary: testing air to see how much moisture condensed out of it, and using those measurements to extrapolate the likelihood of future rain.

And if predicting daily weather was hard, modeling the climate seemed even more daunting. You had to get the water cycle right, but you also had to know how the Earth absorbed and radiated the sun’s heat, factor a passable version of the atmosphere into the equations, and analyze how various kinds of soil held water differently. Even with early IBM computers available, it felt sometimes to Manabe as if there were too many moving parts to solve.