Late in 1966, in the sprawling computer lab of the Washington, D.C., office building that housed the United States Weather Bureau, Syukuro Manabe was waiting for a print job to finish. At stake was the fate of the planet. Manabe, who was thirty-five, had come to the U.S. from Japan almost a decade earlier. He managed a team of computer programmers, tasked with building a mathematical simulation of the planet's atmosphere. It had taken years to perfect, and cost millions of dollars. Now the simulation was complete.

Japanese-American scientist Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann of Germany and Giorgio Parisi of Italy on Tuesday won the Nobel Physics Prize for climate models and the understanding of physical systems. The Nobel committee said it was sending a message with its prize announcement just weeks before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, as the rate of global warming sets off alarm bells around the world. "The world leaders that haven't got the message yet, I'm not sure they will get it because we are saying it," said Thor Hans Hansson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. "But … what we are saying is that the modeling of climate is solidly based in physics theory." Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, will share half of the 10 million kronor ($1.1 million) prize for their research on climate models.