How climate models got so accurate they earned a Nobel Prize

The ability of climate models to predict levels of warming, and to attribute natural disasters directly to climate change, has gone from being intensely criticized to winning a Nobel Prize for Physics this year.

Kieran Mulvaney, National Geographic October 5, 2021

Climate modelers are having a moment.

Last month, Time Magazine listed two of them—Friederike Otto and Geert Jan van Oldenborg of the World Weather Attribution Project—among the 100 Most Influential People of 2021. Two weeks ago, Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University was a guest on the popular CBS talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! And on Tuesday, pioneering climate modelers Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselman shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi—a recognition, said Thors Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, that “our knowledge about the climate rests on a solid scientific foundation, based on a rigorous analysis of observations.”

More