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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: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday March 17 2017, @03:53PM (2 children)
That's about a decade later than TFA's climate model.
That's the thing about global cooling -- it was never a very popular theory. (See here [confex.com] for one survey of the literature of the time, where a lot more academic papers showed warming, and the global cooling papers were much less frequently cited in the 1970s.)
I think that these failed predictions are a contributing factor to older people's skepticism against global warming.
Sorry, but I think that's BS. At least, I think those predictions and even the media coverage in the 1970s is insufficient to explain the skepticism. The real problem is what happened a couple decades later when the anti-warming folks tried to take this old (and largely forgotten outside of specialist circles) story and make it seem like it was a bigger deal than people at the time thought it was.
Yes, there were some crazy media reports in the 1970s, but there are reports on the evening news every night about some common thing that "could kill you" or "may harm your kids" or whatever. Global cooling was one of those fads that had a few articles and was likely forgotten a week later when the next demonic thing was unveiled by the media (butter and fat, rap music destroying our culture, whatever...).
So, it's not the "failed predictions" that's the problem -- it's how the anti-warming folks spun this story years later. And of course, from a rational standpoint, the "consensus" was completely different by any measurement. Global cooling was never anywhere near a dominant theory, and its few adherents gradually dissipated within a decade or so after the theory emerged. Global warming had something >90% consensus by the early 1990s and is now >99% consensus among climate experts according to recent surveys of the literature.
I do tend to have a "wait and see" attitude.
If this were the 1990s, I'd be okay with that. If this were the early 2000s, I'd say you're down to "fringe view" by scientific metrics, but okay. But today, there's just no rational position against the idea of global warming in general. Even most of the hard-core deniers have come around to grudgingly admitting there IS a strong warming trend; they may just disagree with how big it is or how much of it is caused by humans.
There's still good reason to always read the uncertainty estimates for models and to check back and see how those predictions did. But "wait and see" about whether there's global warming happening at all? That's no longer tenable. And claiming skepticism against a current 99% expert consensus is rational based on a 50-year-old minority theory that sputtered out within a few years is a problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @08:20PM
Did you just hear an explosion and a loud metal rattle? That was your credibility blasting itself off and skidding to a stop behind you.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, living a fairly sheltered life out of the government school system with otherwise laid-back parents who didn't like their kids wasting time watching television. Even so, somehow, between the almost-daily evening TV news and Saturday morning cartoons, I grew up with the idea that human activity was RUINING the planet, and that we were heading into a new ice age because of it. No one to my recollection explicitly taught me this - it was simply an idea repeatedly and consistently pushed even in out in the sticks where I grew up.
Couple that along with the laughabl^W fraudulent claims about the "food pyramid", healthcare, and other modern political frauds, and bet yer britches anyone with their head screwed on straight is skeptical of government-pushed hysteria.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday March 17 2017, @10:04PM
I do tend to have a "wait and see" attitude.
If this were the 1990s, I'd be okay with that. If this were the early 2000s, I'd say you're down to "fringe view" by scientific metrics, but okay. But today, there's just no rational position against the idea of global warming in general. Even most of the hard-core deniers have come around to grudgingly admitting there IS a strong warming trend; they may just disagree with how big it is or how much of it is caused by humans.
That's not what I meant. Climate has always been changing and it will keep changing, for all kinds of causes. My skepticism is against the people shouting that it'll be the end of the world. It won't, some areas will become worse or impossible to live in, some will become better places to live. We will adapt. Just wait and see.
Just this week I saw an article claiming that animals will be getting smaller because of global warming. I claim bullshit. Vegetation will increase because of increased CO2 levels. This leads to abundance, which will lead to larger animals. That's how it has always been.
Not just the failed predictions of the past, that were really blown up much bigger that what you seem to believe, but also the constant bombardment with bullshit claims and fake solutions made me a "wait and see" believer. By which I don't mean to do nothing and just keep on burning hydrocarbons, I believe that is a phase we as an intelligent species must go through and have to finish to get ahead. I even believe that this is probably the same on many worlds with evolving life like ours. We will have to get over the fossil fuels, or the world might get over us, not because he world would end, but because we'd have proven to be too stupid to get to the next level.