Meet the team shaking up climate models
Why We Wrote This
If scientists can create a new way to predict climate change – making it as accurate as, say, forecasting the weather – it would help people make everyday decisions: how high to build a sea wall or what crops to plant.
January 22, 2021
By Doug Struck Correspondent
Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin was tall and rugged, with the flowing beard and raucus mustache popular in the late 1800s. As a young geology professor, he hiked the flatlands of southeast Wisconsin, surveying tracks of long-gone glaciers. It was popular at the time to speculate on what caused the rise and fall of ice ages, and Chamberlin seized on one theory that pointed to a gas.
“The effect of the carbon dioxide and water vapor is to blanket the earth with a thermally absorbent envelope,†he wrote in 1899. He concluded that doubling that gas in the atmosphere would raise the temperature of the Earth by 8 or 9 degrees Celsius.
This relationship between carbon dioxide and the Earth’s temperature came to be known as the greenhouse effect. Chamberlin was right about the linkage, though he was off in the numbers.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2021/0122/Meet-the-team-shaking-up-climate-models
