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posted by martyb on Friday March 17 2017, @08:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the testable-predictions-==-science dept.

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]


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @02:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @02:41PM (#480410)

    In the 1970s the world was led to believe that a new ice age was on its way

    So what if something was said in the 1970s? That's not an argument in your favour.

    Fuck me, Leonard Nimoy was on TV doing UFO and Atlantis stuff (and being taken seriously), the rise of psychopathic New Age Scheisters like Stuart Wilde, Scientology was all the rage, and telikenetic spoon bending was being touted as real, too. In the 70s we learned that dinosaurs looked like big lizards, Neanderthals were brutish and stupid and we were all going to be living on the moon in big glass domes by 2000.

    I would take anything claimed in the 70s to be bullshit. Fun times though :)