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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @06:13PM (2 children)
Just means the media reported it badly, and the public gobbled it up because they couldn't know any better.
I disagree. They reported it imperfectly. But they could have done a lot worse. As someone who was involved with Y2K remediation long before the media started reporting on it, I thought they did a decent job. They were a little breathless at the end, but that excitement did not create any significant problems of its own. And was to be expected, just like the media got a little breathless predicting the latest east-coast snowstorm.
Seriously, they could have made things a lot worse if they had tried - there were no mass exoduses of the cities, supermarkets did brisk business in the days before but nothing more than they do before a predicted blizzard or hurricane. No stampedes. No civil unrest. Sure some marginal people were triggered into going full-prepper, but those kinds of people are looking for things to exaggerate in order to justify their paranoia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @11:10PM (1 child)
Also Jesus didn't return to lead a jihad against the unbelievers. :(
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 18 2017, @08:49AM
He tried. But his return vehicle suffered from a Y2K bug, therefore he didn't make it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.