The Global Computer Model
117 “We are entering an era”: Harold M. Schmeck Jr., “Scientist Sees Man’s Activities Ruling Climate By 2000,” The New York Times, April 30, 1970.
117 The first GCM was programmed: NOAA Celebrates 200 Years of Science, Service and Stewardship, “Top Tens: Breakthroughs: The First Climate Model,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/breakthroughs/climate_model/welcome.html#model
Accessed 11-1-22.
117 Princeton’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory: Piers Foster, “Half A Century of Robust Climate Models,” Nature, May 18, 2017. “The researchers worked at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, which had acquired one of the first commercial computers. Manabe had been brought in to lead the development of the world’s first general circulation model.”
NOAA Celebrates 200 Years of Science, Service and Stewardship, “Top Tens: Breakthroughs: The First Climate Model,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/breakthroughs/climate_model/welcome.html#model
Accessed 10-23-22.
117 Another government program: At its 1955 founding. It was then transferred one dozen years later to the short-lived Environmental Science Services Administration (the first U.S. government agency bearing the word environment—weirdly, as part of the Department of Commerce). This became, in 1970, the NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the best named agency in government—both Homeric and bureaucratic—and weirdly still part of the Department of Commerce).
NOAA Central Library, “Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory,” OAR GFDL.
https://libguides.library.noaa.gov/c.php?g=846284&p=6149205
Accessed 10-22-22.
Some of the Syukoro Manabe material in this brief chapter comes from:
Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990;
William K. Stevens, The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate, Delacorte 1999;
Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, Harvard University Press 2003
Kendall McGuffie, Ann Henderson-Sellers, The Climate Modelling Primer, Wiley-Blackwell 2014;
Piers Foster, “Half A Century of Robust Climate Models,” Nature, May 18, 2017.
And Syukoro Manabe’s two Oral History interviews—1989 and 1998—at the American Institute of Physics.
1989: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/5040
1998: Session I: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/32158-1
1998: Session II: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/32158-2
Manabe is a fascinating, brilliant, and charmingly modest man; informed in 2021 he was to receive the Nobel (Physics), the scientist replied, “If you look at the list of past winners, they are amazing people who have done marvelous work. In contrast, what I have been doing looks trivial to me. But I’m not going to complain!”
Liz Fuller-Wright, “ ‘Great Fun’: Manabe Wins Nobel Prize in Physics for Modeling Climate Change,” Office of Communications, Princeton University, October 5, 2021.
Accessed 11-1-22.
117 on the Japanese island of Shikoku: Kitta Macpherson, “He Warned Of Warming Long Before It Was Cool,” The Newark Star-Ledger, February 4, 2007.
This was a special piece acknowledging the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change essentially validating Manabe’s forty-two-year-old numbers; Manabe was a newsworthy stone’s throw away in nearby Princeton.
“When the United Nations issued its long-awaited, authoritative report on global warming the other day, Manabe couldn’t help but feel vindicated. The report’s findings were eerily similar to his own 42-year-old discoveries.”
The Star-Ledger quoted veteran Princeton climate scientist Jerry Mahlman. “He is the pioneer — period — on planet Earth that raised the question of global warming. Suki was the first one to get the fundamental essence of global warming right.”
117 The postwar Japanese economy: Syukuro Manabe, Paul Edwards, Interviewer, American Institute of Physics, Oral History Interviews, March 14, 1998. Session I:
https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/32158-1
Accessed 10-24-22.
This is Manabe, in 1998, explaining how he came to work with Joe Smagorinsky at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
And so at graduate at a Bachelor’s, B.A., when I got the B.A. obviously I had no job. When I get the Master’s there’s obviously no job. And when I got the Ph.D., after I finished Ph.D., there was no job. So there was a job but paid very little. I can’t support my family. [N]obody could support a family. Very difficult. . . . And so that’s how I decided to, when Joe, Joe Smagorinsky, asked me whether I was interested. Another guy is Miakoda one year ahead of him. And he and I, he named both of us. Joe was doing numerical weather prediction of rainfall, and we are doing it to rainfall manually. Joe was doing it at Princeton Advanced Study computers. We are doing it manually in Japan about the same time. And I remember I worked about 18 hours a day, several one of us, so we replacing computer by hand. And so Joe looked at that paper and then said you know one or two, one person out of it and either Miakoda or myself to come to the USA. So I took that opportunity.
117 Manabe arrived in America: Syukuro Manabe, Paul Edwards, Interviewer, American Institute of Physics, Oral History Interviews, March 14, 1998. Session I.
https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/32158-1
Accessed 10-24-22.
118 boning up on soil and water: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming. Chapter Five, “Public Warnings,” 107.
118 The first big GCM run: That is, when Manabe asked his program to calculate the heating effect from a doubling of atmospheric CO2. The Princeton-neighboring Newark Star Ledger gives this the sound of the 1929 Edison Jubilee. It must be the way we like to retrospectively celebrate our large moments.
Long before global warming was a household phrase, at a time when climate research was in its infancy, a young scientist in an out-of-the-way lab in Princeton changed the world by asking a computer a few surprising questions.
What would happen, Syukuro Manabe wanted to know, if the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere doubled?
He plugged the numbers into his computer and then sat back and waited . . . That was in 1965.
Kitta Macpherson, “He Warned Of Warming Long Before It Was Cool,” The Newark Star-Ledger, February 4, 2007.
118 a UNIVAC 1108: NOAA Celebrates 200 Years of Science, Service and Stewardship, “Top Tens: Breakthroughs: The First Climate Model,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/breakthroughs/climate_model/welcome.html#model
Accessed 10-23-22.
118 half a megabyte of storage: NOAA Celebrates 200 Years of Science, Service and Stewardship, “Top Tens: Breakthroughs: The First Climate Model,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/breakthroughs/climate_model/welcome.html#model
Accessed 10-23-22.
118 Crunching twenty-four hours’ worth of atmosphere: NOAA Celebrates 200 Years of Science, Service and Stewardship, “Top Tens: Breakthroughs: The First Climate Model,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/breakthroughs/climate_model/welcome.html#model
Accessed 10-23-22.
118 some runs lasted fifty days: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming. Chapter Six, “The Erratic Beast,” 137.
118 a photograph of Manabe: The photo’s posted at Wordpress.
https://simpleclimate.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/manabe.jpg
Accessed 10-23-22.
118 Manabe’s GCM results: Scientist Piers Foster calls the 1967 Manabe study “arguably the greatest climate-science paper of all time.”
Piers Foster, “Half A Century of Robust Climate Models,” Nature, May 18, 2017.
The piece, Foster goes on, “essentially settled the debate on whether carbon dioxide causes global warming, building a mathematically sound climate model that was the first to yield physically realistic results.”
118 Doubling the parts-per-million: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, 112.
“They used as a benchmark the difference if the CO2 level was doubled. After all, Keeling’s curve showed that the level would probably double sometime in the twenty-first century. The number Manabe’s group came up with for doubled CO2 was a rise of global temperature of roughly 2°C (around 3 to 4°F). This was the first time a greenhouse-effect warming calculation included enough of the essential factors to seem reasonable to many experts. As [geochemist and oceanographer Wallace] Broecker for one recalled, it was the 1967 paper ‘that convinced me that this was a thing to worry about.’”
118 His 1967 paper: Syukuro Manabe, Richard Wetherald, “Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity,” Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, Vol. 24 No. 3, May 1967.
The key calculation: “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.”
118 one of the most-quoted: In 2017, Forbes called the 1967 model almost perfect, and offered this unforgettable bit of data.
In 2015, all the coordinating lead authors, lead authors and review editors on the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report were asked to nominate their most influential climate change papers of all time. The 1967 paper by Manabe and Wetherald received eight nominations; no other paper received more than three.
Ethan Siegel, “The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly,” Forbes, May 15, 2017.
118 in climate literature: Roz Pidcock, “The most influential climate change papers of all time,” Carbon Brief, July 6, 2015. Paper number two was Dave Keeling, his carbon dioxide measurements from Mauna Loa.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-most-influential-climate-change-papers-of-all-time
Accessed 10-23-22.
118 “I just happened”: The Institute for Scientific Information ranks the paper a “citation classic.”
Kendall McGuffie, Ann Henderson-Sellers, The Climate Modelling Primer, Wiley-Blackwell 2014, 95.
The Primer notes (94) that Manabe would “go on to become one of the world leaders in climate modeling.”
Kitta Macpherson, “He Warned Of Warming Long Before It Was Cool,” The Newark Star-Ledger, February 4, 2007.
118 Manabe received the Nobel Prize: Here’s the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Svante Arrhenius’ old outfit) in their announcement: “Syukuro Manabe demonstrated how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere lead to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth. In the 1960s, he led the development of physical models of the Earth’s climate and was the first person to explore the interaction between radiation balance and the vertical transport of air masses. His work laid the foundation for the development of current climate models.”
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021,” Press Release, October 5, 2021.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2021/press-release/
Accessed 10-23-22.
118 “convinced me that this was a thing to worry about”: Wallace Broecker, Spencer Weart Interviewer, Oral History Interviews, American Institute of Physics, November 14, 1997.
https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/23909-1
Accessed 10-27-22.
Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, 112.
119 He’d call this: Wallace Broecker, “The Great Ocean Conveyor,” Oceanography, Vol. 4 No. 2, 1991.
Wallace Broecker, The Great Ocean Conveyor: Discovering the Trigger for Abrupt Climate Change, Princeton University Press 2010.
Wallace Broecker, Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat—and How To Counter It, Hill and Wang | Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008. Preface, “Taming the Beast,” xiii.
Here writing about himself in the third person. “Similar swings happened repeatedly during the Ice Age itself. Broecker’s theory is that they were caused by a sudden jamming or restarting of what he dubbed the conveyor belt, a globe-spanning system of ocean currents that transports heat to the North Atlantic.”
119 “the great ocean conveyor belt”: A good quick primer: National Ocean Service, “What Is The Global Ocean Conveyor Belt?”, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, February 26, 2021.
119 “the two-mile time machine”: The geoscientist Richard Alley.
Richard Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future, Princeton University Press 2000.
119 Broecker plugged Manabe’s GCM numbers: Allegra LeGrande, David Rind, Dorothy Peteet, Gavin Schmidt, “Wallace Broecker and GISS,” NASA, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, March 2019.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/201903_broecker/
Accessed 10-26-22.
119 “By the first decade”: Wallace Broecker, “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”, Science, Vol. 189 No. 4201, August 8, 1975.
119 the twelve hottest since record-keeping began: Wallace Broecker, Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate. Preface, “Taming the Beast,” xi.
119 Broecker published in the journal Science: Wallace Broecker, “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”, Science, Vol. 189 No. 4201, August 8, 1975.
119 and pointed out in the Wall Street Journal: Jerry E. Bishop, “Geochemist Sees Carbon Dioxide Causing Sharper Warming in Next Climate Cycle,” The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 1975.
119 that man-made carbon dioxide had multiplied: 36 years later, Think Progress noted the Broecker predictive acumen. “Broecker has been fortunate, because the cooling effects of human aerosol emissions have roughly cancelled out the warming effects of human non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions since 1975, and solar activity has been flat over that period,” notes the piece. “So the net effect of the factors which he did not take into account has been close to zero. However, Broecker was also smart; the dominant effect on temperature since 1975 has been from CO2, as he expected. It’s better to be lucky than good, but it’s best to be both.”
Broecker anticipated the actual increase in CO2 very closely, predicting 373 ppm in 2000 and 403 ppm in 2010 (actual values were 369 and 390 ppm, respectively).
Think Progress, “Wallace Broecker’s Remarkable 1975 Global Warming Prediction,” August 12, 2011.
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/wallace-broeckers-remarkable-1975-global-warming-prediction-1976337267b8/
Accessed 10-25-22.
119 helped popularize the term “global warming”: David Wallace-Wells, author of the immersive and unnerving The Uninhabitable Earth (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming Tim Duggan Books|Penguin Random House 2019), ascribes creation of the term to Broecker.
David Wallace-Wells, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” New York Magazine, July 10, 2017. “That is what Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer who coined the term ‘global warming,’ means when he calls the planet an ‘angry beast.’”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/man-who-coined-global-warming-on-worst-case-scenarios.html
Accessed 10-25-22.
119 “We may be in for a climatic surprise”: Wallace Broecker, “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”, Science, Vol. 189 No. 4201, August 8, 1975.
120 “The consensus”: Robert C. Cowen, “Burning Too Much Coal Could Change Climate,” The Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 1977.
This was David H. Slade, Acting Director of Environmental Programs for the Energy Research and Development Administration; formed in 1975, the ERDA would two years later become the Department of Energy. Slade would then become manager of the Carbon Dioxide and Climate Research Office there. One of the very influential figures at the start of federal response to climate change.
120 the Russians had adopted: This was in Jack Anderson’s syndicated column, with Les Whitten as co-writer.
Jack Anderson, Les Whitten, “Soviets Heed CIA, Study Climate,” The Washington Post, August 7, 1976.
Anderson was then at the height of his own influence: the newspaperman had appeared on Time’s cover a year earlier, under the strapline “Jack Anderson, Supersnoop.”
120 “firmly convinced”: Jack Anderson, Les Whitten, “Soviets Heed CIA, Study Climate,” The Washington Post, August 7, 1976.
Epstein—whom Anderson lists as an “American scientist”—two years later became director of NOAA’s National Climate Program. The federal response was taking shape.
It’d be fun to end this chapter’s notes on that dramatic and overdue sentence. But there’s touching comedy, to read the first story that mentions Dr. Epstein’s new, climate-oriented title. This is a full-page piece in the Sunday Washington Post, November 19, 1978.
That’s nearly 45 Thanksgivings ago, counting by holiday. Just 12 holidays after the New York City smog that took hundreds of people and ended up as sixty-minutes on Mad Men. That is, it’s closer in time to the old sooty America than the new cleaner one in which most of us reside. Yet still our world; still the question we’d ask today. Which is what this section of the book has been about.
You’ll get it right from the title—which gave this reader a soft smile, then a jolt. Joanne Omang, “Should Science Forestall the Warming of the World?”, The Washington Post, November 19, 1978.
It now seems almost certain that humankind’s brief reign on earth has guaranteed our great-grandchildren a warmer climate to live in than anything the planet has seen over the past 5,000 years. . . . “Never in the history of mankind’s affairs have planners and decision-maker been given such a forewarning—with the possible exception of the biblical story of Joseph’s advice to the pharaoh about the seven years of plenty and the seven year of famine,” wrote [climate pioneer] W. W. Kellogg of the National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colo., in a recent World Meteorological Association bulletin.
Not only do we have a pretty good idea what is likely to happen, he added, but “action could be taken to avoid [the warming] if we really wanted to.”
We’ve been circling the same block, putt-putting in our cars, for 45 years.
