Tetsunori Koizumi, Director
According to the press release issued on 5 October 2021, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 to three scientists “for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems.” Of the three awardees, Shukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann have been recognized “for physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”, while Giorgio Parisi “for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” By explicitly referring to “Earth’s climate” and “global warming” in describing the contributions by Shukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences confirms that the Earth’s climate has been warming influenced by human activities, and thus adds support for environmentalists around the world who have been calling for changes in the mode of conducting our lives if we are to avert the climate crisis that threatens the future of human civilization.
Actually, this is not the first time that the Nobel Prize is awarded to someone whose work has to do with climate change. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international organization established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). The IPCC has been issuing reports to inform the world about the connection between human activities and global warning, providing solid evidence to dispel the claim made by some people in the 1980s that global warning is not merely an interesting hypothesis. As a matter of fact, the latest report of the IPCC issued in August of this year, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, contains a strong warning to all of us, saying that climate change is now widespread, rapid, and intensifying.
Al Gore, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 with the IPCC, is known for his 2006 book titled: An Inconvenient Truth. As for the reason why he chose this title, Al Gore explained that he just wanted to write about the reality of climate change as “a way of highlighting the reasons why some people, including the president, don’t seem to accept the truth.” As one who served sixteen years in the US Congress and eight years as Vice President, he ought to know very well about politicians who were reluctant to accept the truth about climate change. Climate change was also an inconvenient truth for those business executives who were associated with automobile companies, utility companies, and oil production. In fact, Gore spent six years traveling around the world with a slide show, presenting a compelling evidence of global warming caused by the emission of greenhouse gases by industrial activities and warning about the dire consequences for the Earth unless decisive measures are taken to reverse it.
What is significant about the Nobel Prize 2021 is that, while the 2007 award was for “peace”, this year’s award is for “physics”, with two of the three awardees being climate scientists. The modeling of the Earth’s climate by Shuruko Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann that made possible to predict global warming, combined with the latest IPCC report released in August prepared by IPCC scientists, leaves no doubt that climate change is not an inconvenient truth but an undeniable fact backed by solid scientific evidence. Climate change is, to borrow an expression from Jane Austen, “a truth universally acknowledged”. What this means is that whether we are in possession of wealth or not, “business as usual” is no longer an acceptable way to conduct our lives. We must all live up to our responsibilities as global citizens to do what we can to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere if we are to avert the crisis of global civilization.