Manabe receives Nobel Prize medal

By Sho Funakoshi / Yomiuri Shimbun Correspondent

December 7, 2021

WASHINGTON — Syukuro Manabe and two other Nobel Prize laureates received their medals and diplomas during a ceremony at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on Monday, which was early Tuesday in Japan.

Manabe, 90, a senior meteorologist at Princeton University, received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in opening the gate to predicting changes in the climate. He received the award — a medal — and diploma from Karin Olofsdotter, the Swedish ambassador to the United States.

He is the 28th Nobel Prize winner of Japanese descent and the first one since two years ago. Among the 28, he is one of three who are U.S. citizens. He is also the 12th to win the Nobel Prize in Physics following Takaaki Kajita, a distinguished professor at the University of Tokyo, in 2015.

After the ceremony, Manabe said he was very happy. He also said with a smile that the medal is quite heavy and wonderful.

Manabe began studying how to develop a physical model to predict climate change by using computers in the late 1950s. He became a pioneer in showing the world that increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other gases would cause global warming.

He continued to improve the model and wrote part of the first assessment reports released in 1990 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. panel.

His achievements laid the basis for studying the influence of human activities on global warming and served as scientific grounds for measures against global warming that countries across the world are undertaking.

The ceremony for all awards except the Nobel Peace Prize will be held in Stockholm on Friday, the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prize. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, recipients will not attend the ceremony. Instead, they are following an unusual procedure of receiving the medal and diploma in advance in the countries where they live.