When he produced a simulation of the effects of climate change in the late 1960s, Syukuro Manabe used a printer that could not properly print a curve containing all the data, so he drew it with a pencil. While computer technology has improved markedly since then, Manabe’s findings about the Earth’s warming effects remain true these many decades later.
Last year, at 90 years of age, Manabe shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with two others for his groundbreaking work using mathematical models to predict climate change. His long list of honors includes the Blue Planet Prize, the Volvo Environment Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Crafoord Prize, and the Asahi Prize, among many others.
Manabe was born in Japan and lived with his family in an isolated mountain hamlet, where his father worked as the village doctor. Armed with a PhD but little English, he arrived in the United States in 1958 to work as a research meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau.
“Looking back over my long research career that lasted almost 60 years, I find it most enjoyable to conduct numerical experiments using a climate model as a virtual laboratory,” said Manabe, a senior meteorologist in the program in atmospheric and oceanic sciences at Princeton University. “I hope that the new generation of climate scientists conduct countless numerical experiments, unraveling the mystery of climate of past, present and future.”
