Weart 3
Is human technology powerful enough to change the natural patterns
of the entire globe?
- some people still believe no
- but by 1965 greater concern about pollution
had changed thinking
- and the experience of atomic bombs (both used
on Japan and testing) had shown how much power humans now have
- invisible radioactivity from bomb tests could
be detected all around the world
- some people also blamed testing for changes in
weather
- by the 1960s evidence that the world was
getting warmer was strong enough to convince most
meteorologists
A 1963 conference report was the first to project
dangerous global warming (4 degrees in a century)
- mostly such reports called for more funding
for scientific research
- new ways to measure patterns over hundreds of
thousands of years--pollen counts, oxygen isotopes in the muck
on the ocean floor
Intense scientific controversy over what caused
ice ages
- much debate over how quickly change could
happen
- if change happened quickly that showed climate
was unstable
- several theories that were quickly disproved
opened up the thinking of scientists
- swift disastrous climate change became
thinkable
Meanwhile, computers were making possible
numerical weather prediction
- can we make a model of the weather? or the
climate?
- 1922 Lewis Fry Richardson proposed a model of
the atmosphere as a series of cells with rules for how they
influenced each other
- it took six weeks with pencil and paper to do
the calculations for an 8 hour forecast (and the forecast
wasn't right)
- after WWII the navy was willing to fund this
as a key use for the new digital computers
- even with early computers it took 24 hours to
calculate a 24 hour forecast in 1950
- by the mid 1960s with the addition of
satellite data these began to be useful for weather
forecasting
- predictions easily went weird if pushed too
far, which might be because the models weren't good enough
- but might be because the climate system was
unstable
new evidence and theories were increasingly
supporting the ideas that climate could change more easily and
more swiftly than scientists had thought
the atmosphere and ocean currents were deeply interconnected so
you couldn't say much from just one field of science
