Nancai Quick Review: Why the Nobel Prize is once again related to climate change

The highlight of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Science, the Nobel Prize in Physics, was awarded to the study of complex systems, but more precisely, this important scientific discovery award was awarded to climate research, especially climate change research. This is not the first time the Nobel Prize has been awarded to scholars studying climate change. The first was in 2007, when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in recognition of their contributions to the fight against climate change. The second time, in 2018, was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Professor William D. Nordhaus of Yale University in recognition of its incorporation of elements of climate change into the theoretical and modeling framework of macroeconomic growth. The third time is this year, half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for their contributions to "physical modeling of the Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming." The Nobel Prize and climate change have become more and more mainstream in academia from the initial politics, to economics, and then to physics.

Two scholars, Shuro Makoto and Hasselman, are the lead authors of the first working group of the IPCC and the most prominent pioneers in the field of climate change science. Makoto is a senior climatologist at Princeton University in the United States, whose main contribution is to establish the quantitative relationship between carbon dioxide concentration and radiation forcing and temperature rise in the atmosphere earlier, while Haselmann is a professor at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Germany, whose main contribution is to establish a complex chaotic relationship between short-term weather changes and long-term climate change, both of which have made foundational contributions to the construction of climate change system models and scientific assessments. In particular, Mr. Makoto Shuro has close contacts with the Chinese academic community, has visited China many times, and has great respect for Mr. Ye Duzheng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and meteorologist, and attended the celebration of Mr. Ye Duzheng's 90th birthday in 2005.

The discipline of climate change is a large-span multidisciplinary and complex scientific research involving natural and social sciences such as geophysics, atmospheric chemistry, ecology, economy, society, politics, diplomacy, and law. With the deepening of research in the past three decades, these disciplines are no longer independent research, but extensive cooperation and cross-cutting research, mutual convergence and feedback, and jointly complete a comprehensive assessment of climate change.

Makoto visited China in 2005

The promulgation of the Nobel Prize in Physics coincides with the carbon neutrality goals proposed by countries by the middle of this century, which has aroused the attention of all sectors of society and has a better understanding of the scientific facts of climate change. Climate change is quite different from the usual environmental problems in the following aspects: in terms of causes and effects, it is global; it is not only a contemporary, but also a long-term, intergenerational problem; the potential impact is very large and mostly irreversible; the causal chain is long and complex, and there is a lot of uncertainty in most links; the main responsibility is more difficult to be fairly determined, involving the fundamental interests of the survival and development of all countries, and there is a conflict of principle in political positions.

It has been a long and tortuous process since the French scientist Joseph Fourier proposed the hypothesis about the greenhouse effect in the early 19th century to the entry of global climate change into the political and public eye. Unlike the three Nobel Prizes that led to climate change, the spread of knowledge about climate change actually went through the opposite process.

The first research began in the early 19th and early 20th centuries. Due to the investigation of the possible causes of prehistoric ice ages, scientists John Tyndall and Svante August Arrhenius conducted initial studies on climate warming caused by greenhouse gases and anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. However, due to the limitations of human culture and religious beliefs at the time, these studies do not lead to doubts about the powerful forces, balances, and orders of nature that can be influenced and destroyed by small human activities. In the century and a half that followed, scientists from different disciplines tried to explain the phenomenon of climate change on earth from the perspectives of geography (crustal motion, volcanoes, etc.), oceanography (ocean circulation, etc.), biochemistry (forest and land use, etc.), astronomy (sunspot cycle), and celestial mechanics (the earth's rotation axis and orbit), but any single discipline of research was not enough to convince scientists of each other. It wasn't until 1938 that engineer Guy Stewart Callendar proposed that rising global temperatures were closely related to carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuel combustion, the Callendar effect, but experts were skeptical about it, and the study didn't get enough attention at the time.

The second phase is a comprehensive study within the natural sciences, which began in the mid-20th century. The demand for meteorological science during World War II and the Cold War brought new opportunities for interdisciplinary and integrated research on climate change, and scientists Carl-Gustaf Arvid Rossby, Gilbert Norman Plass, Hans Eduard Suess, Roger Randall Dougan Revelle, etc. integrated and developed the discipline of climate research, using new methods such as carbon isotopes to measure carbon elements in the atmosphere and oceans. Using computer technology to simulate global climate change, it is proposed that climate change may become a serious problem for future generations. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) replaced the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) as a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1951 and established the International Year of Geophysics (IGY), 1957-1958, planning and implementing various interdisciplinary and cross-border research projects. With the support of all parties, scientist Charles David Keeling, after years of persistent research, confirmed that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are indeed on the rise, and that human activities are the culprits of the greenhouse effect and global warming, and proposed the extremely influential Keeling Curve. But this is still a discovery of the possibility of global climate change. In the mid-20th century, environmental pollution caused by rapid industrial development and the emergence of nuclear weapons technology made the scientific, political and public circles begin to pay attention to the huge impact that human activities and technology could have on the planet. The publication of Marine Biologist Rachel Louise Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and the first report of the Club of Rome, The Limits of Growth, in 1972, began to reflect on existing patterns of development and human-induced environmental change. People began to believe in the phenomenon of global warming and scientific theories that human activities could change the climate, but did not believe that climate change would bring significant harm. The possibility of warming is so uncertain that no scientist has considered recommending that people take action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In the process, the scientific community continues to debate widely about the causes of climate change based on the latest paleoclimatology and ice age data and evidence (pollen, plankton fossils, ice cores, deep-sea sediments, etc.), and attempts to simulate atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns using physical and mathematical models. In addition, comparative studies have been conducted on the climatic causes of planets such as Mars and Venus. With the rapid development of systems theory, cybernetics and information theory, climate change research has entered a new stage, and scientists are more convinced that climate change is the result of the complex interaction and synthesis of multiple factors.

The third stage is the comprehensive study of natural and social sciences. Since the 1970s, the world theme of peace and development, the rise of environmentalism, the melting of ice sheets, the frequent occurrence of climate disasters, and new research advances (especially the rapid development of computer simulation technology) have prompted scientists to pay more attention to changes in the earth's environment, research funds have also crossed the boundaries of traditional disciplines and organizations to fund climate change research, the number of publications in this field has begun to rise rapidly, and politicians have begun to recognize the value of climate change in media and public issues. Some companies in energy and high-emission industries have also begun to engage in public relations and intervention. Scientists James Hansen, Shuro Makoto, Kirk Bryan, and others have studied climate sensitivity when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is doubled, and Veerabhadran Ramanathan and others have noted other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are relatively small but growing rapidly and also have a large impact. The National Academy of Sciences established the Committee on Climate Change and in 1977 published a report on energy and climate, noting that climate change is closely linked to energy production and consumption. At the same time, new types of research on the social and economic impacts of climate change are gradually being carried out, and more experts and policy makers in the social sciences are involved in the comprehensive assessment of climate change.

The political logic of climate change and response strategies contains two levels of significance: one is to deeply understand the relationship between climate change events themselves, coordination and balance of climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation; the other is to integrate climate change into other non-climate international and domestic decision-making systems, and to coordinate and balance the relationship between climate change and human social and economic development, in order to provide discernible, comparable and credible information in the specific risk analysis process such as policies and investments at different time and space scales. Achieving these goals requires a longer historical retrospective and a broader global perspective.

Global climate change, its interaction with human activities and the series of problems arising therefrom have attracted widespread attention and research from countries around the world. All of the above scientists have made great contributions to this process, and Makoto and Hasselman are the main promoters and pioneers of it. The Nobel Prize has been linked to climate change many times, which shows that the fact that human activities cause climate warming has been widely accepted by mainstream society, and countries around the world are considering taking action to actively deal with climate change. But in the face of climate change, the international community is still far apart about what can and should be done, and it is foreseeable that we still have a long way to go before effective action to truly achieve carbon neutrality.

(The author is director of the Strategic Planning Department of the National Climate Strategy Center)

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