Fifty years ago, on this day, January 5 1973, the UK Meteorological Office published one of its first articles about climate change.
‘Response of a General Circulation Model of the Atmosphere to Removal of the Arctic Ice-Cap,’’
https://www.nature.com/articles/241039b0
This did not emerge from nowhere. As Janet Martin-Nielson (2018: 229) writes
“After nine years of development, the 5-level GCM was finally published in 1972 in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. 18 In the same year, Gilchrist, Corby, and Newson released their results on climate and sea-surface temperature anomalies, and Newson published his work on the climatic impacts of Arctic sea ice melt in Nature.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 328.5ppm. As of 2023 it is 417. .
The context was that scientists through the 50s and 60s were getting interested in long-term climatic change, and some of them had proper computers to play with (the whole Charney, von Neumann, Phillips thing is beyond this site, but you could check out Paul Edwards’ book “A Vast Machine” if you really like.)
What I think we can learn from this
This stuff is complex. Smart people have had to expend a lot of mental effort to get a grip. The rest of us get to stand on each others’ shoulders and toes.
What happened next
The models got better. The politicians were warned. The politicians did not lead. Nor were they forced by social movements to lead. And here we are.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
References
Edwards, P. 2010. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. MIT Press.
Martin-Nielson, J. 2018. Computing the Climate: When Models Became Political. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2018) 48 (2): 223–245. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2018.48.2.223