The Earth as viewed from a composite of NASA satellite images from space in the early 2000s. Image credit: NASA / Blue Marble Project.

The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly

For those who still don’t believe in global warming, the science has had it right for half a century now.

“Greenhouse gases are the second most important factor for climate, after the Sun.” -Syukuro Manabe

Modeling the Earth’s climate is one of the most daunting, complicated tasks out there. If only we were more like the Moon, things would be easy. The Moon has no atmosphere, no oceans, no icecaps, no seasons, and no complicated flora and fauna to get in the way of simple radiative physics. No wonder it’s so challenging to model! In fact, if you google “climate models wrong”, eight of the first ten resultsshowcase failure. But headlines are never as reliable as going to the scientific source itself, and the ultimate source, in this case, is the first accurate climate model ever: by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald. 50 years after their groundbreaking 1967 paper, the science can be robustly evaluated, and they got almost everything exactly right.

The Earth and Moon, to scale, in terms of both size and albedo/reflectivity. Note how much fainter the Moon appears, as it absorbs light much better than Earth does. Image credit: NASA / Apollo 17.