Climate Science Comes of Age

For the first time ever, the Physics Nobel has gone to those whose work is enabling humanity to deal with climate change. Both Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann helped show how climate change works and how it will pan out. Manabe was among the first to quantify the relationship between carbon dioxide and global warming. His joint work from the 1960s showed that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will lead to a 2.3 centigrade increase in global temperatures. Hasselmann’s work is of later vintage, from the 1980s, it showed that though normal weather volatility may hide the immediate predictions of climate models, their long-term calculations have predictive power. Taken together their work shows that climate change is real and predictable.

Notice that their work has been around for years, a half-century or so. Why did it take so long to get this recognition? The answer lies in the scientific establishment. Though climate science has been around for some time it has not been accepted by all. Specifically, it was not clear to the cynics whether climate change predictions would pan out. 

Climate change models can’t be like models in pure science where a series of equations, formulations, and assumptions can be penned on a piece of paper and potentially solved. There are many different processes including chemical, physical, biological, and even human, many variables, and ever-changing relationships between variables; moreover, the level of granularity at which an issue is being studied also matters. Something that is critical at the planetary level may not be of much consequence at a microscopic level, and something that is critical at the microscopic level may not have any impact at the global level. But then again, it may. Each of these factors that we need to consider is reduced to a set of quantitative relationships. And computing power is then used to decipher how these multidimensional interactions may pan out over some period of time, and how robust these predictions are to different circumstances.

For many years, many people including the scientific community have believed that modeling such a complex system will not work well. Too many variables changing too frequently will necessarily require many assumptions, and therefore their predictive power is questionable.

Recent events have however shown otherwise. What the models predicted – warmer temperatures, more erratic rainfall, rising frequency of extreme weather events, warming oceans, wildfires, melting glaciers, disappearing Arctic, melting Antarctica, are all occurring with rising frequency. Strangely the force with which this is happening leads to suspect that climate scientists may have been wrong, in that they may have been too conservative in their predictions. And that climate change is far more rapid than their models forecasted.

But these models will now get only better for three reasons. First, improved climate data is already helping climate scientists calibrate their models better. Second, greater recognition by the scientific community will catalyze expertise from other fields to more readily enter this space. And third, greater funds from private sources have increasingly been going into climate sciences.

This is only the beginning. A lot more details are required if we have to address climate change. At this point we only know that the weather will warm up, rains and weather will be volatile, and extreme weather events will increase. How would rivers be impacted, how would crops suffer, deltas and mangroves, eastern Himalayas will be affected in a different manner than those in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand - none of this is known. Every state and district will have a different impact. Not just agriculture, all industries will be impacted in some manner, and each firm and unit will be affected in some manner, labour productivity may also fall with higher heat but no one knows how much, some infrastructure will not be able to hold up, but no one knows how and what we can do about it.

Apart from some dedicated departments in the central government, very little funding goes into climate research in India. State governments have also been amiss in that they need to fund new climate change departments, but none of that is happening yet. We, therefore, depend almost completely on global foundations and governments for climate change research in India. Strangely private philanthropy has also been reluctant to fund climate research. Be it CSR funds or individual philanthropy or grants from trusts and foundations, all of that is missing in the country. 

This Nobel Prize is an affirmation of climate science as a legitimate science by the scientific community. Now it is up to governments and the private sector to use it.

Reference:

Nobel prize: why climate modellers deserved the physics award – they’ve been proved right again and again, The Conversation, October 6, 2021