The development of general circulation models of climate

With the coming of digital computers in the 1950s, a small American team set out to model the weather, followed by attempts to represent the entire general circulation of the atmosphere. The work spread during the 1960s, and by the 1970s a few modelers had produced somewhat realistic looking models of the planet’s regional climate pattern. The work took on wider interest when modelers tried increasing the level of greenhouse gases, and invariably found serious global warming. Skeptics pointed to dubious technical features, but by the late 1990s these problems were largely resolved—thanks to enormous increases in computer power, the number and size of the closely interacting teams that now comprised the international modeling community, and the crucial availability of field experiments and satellite data to set against the models’ assumptions and outputs. By 2007 nearly all climate experts accepted that the climate simulations represented reality well enough to impel strong action to restrict gas emissions.