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On May 1, 1967, Syukuro Manabe (真鍋淑郎) and Richard T. Wetherald published the landmark paper Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (DOI: 10.1175/1520-0469(1967)024<0241:TEOTAW>2.0.CO;2) (URLs shortened because the odd characters in the URL seem to break the links), which was the first major attempt to model the earth's climate. Now, fifty years later, the science can be robustly evaluated, and they got almost everything exactly right. Ethan Siegel has an article (Javascript required) looking back at this first major attempt at global climate modelling and how well it has turned out:
The big advance of Manabe and Wetherald's work was to model not just the feedbacks but the interrelationships between the different components that contribute to the Earth's temperature. As the atmospheric contents change, so do both the absolute and relative humidity, which impacts cloud cover, water vapor content and cycling/convection of the atmosphere. What they found is that if you start with a stable initial state — roughly what Earth experienced for thousands of years prior to the start of the industrial revolution — you can tinker with one component (like CO2) and model how everything else evolves.
The title of their paper, Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (full download for free here), describes their big advances: they were able to quantify the interrelationships between various contributing factors to the atmosphere, including temperature/humidity variations, and how that impacts the equilibrium temperature of Earth. Their major result, from 1967?
According to our estimate, a doubling of the CO2 content in the atmosphere has the effect of raising the temperature of the atmosphere (whose relative humidity is fixed) by about 2 °C.
What we've seen from the pre-industrial revolution until today matches that extremely well. We haven't doubled CO2, but we have increased it by about 50%. Temperatures, going back to the first measurements of accurate global temperatures in the 1880s, have increased by nearly (but not quite) 1 °C.
[Ed note: There seems to be an issue with the DOI link in that the URL itself contains both "<" and ">" characters. The actual URL is:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0469%281967%29024%3C0241%3ATEOTAW%3E2.0.CO%3B2
If you are uncomfortable following the provided bitly link, just copy/paste this link into your browser. --martyb]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by inertnet on Friday March 17 2017, @02:06PM
I don't know how to resolve global warming, or climate control in general. But I agree that current methods aren't doing much. Leaving it to the politicians doesn't work because they mostly have a limited view (up to the next election) and, probably more than average, are opportunists. I live in Europe and when traveling from country to country, it's immediately obvious that policies are very different. In one country you see a lot of solar panels on roofs, or even in fields. In my own country solar panels hardly came off the ground because the subsidy system mostly benefits a limited list of installers and not the end users.
It's clear that if you really want to limit CO2 emissions, you have to quit the habit globally, meaning quit pumping and digging up hydrocarbons completely. It's also obvious that humanity needs time to adapt, so you can't do that abruptly. But I don't see any effort in that direction, new oil, gas and fracking fields are still hailed as beneficial, but the truth is they won't be good for us.
So I come to the same conclusion, there's no real plan. The politicians are too busy with other 'important' things, like fighting their little fights. Giving away all your money to politicians leads to insane systems like a CO2 market, where one can buy rights to produce CO2 that another doesn't need. It's a shady billion dollar business that was created to maintain CO2 levels instead of reducing them.