Climate models are complex, just like the world they
mirror. They simultaneously simulate the interacting, chaotic flow of Earth’s
atmosphere and oceans, and they run on the world’s largest supercomputers.
Critiques of climate science, such as the report written
for the Department
of Energy by a panel in 2025, often point to this complexity to argue
that these models are too uncertain to help us understand present-day warming
or tell us anything useful about the future.
But the history of climate science tells a different
story.
The earliest climate models made specific forecasts about
global warming decades before those forecasts could be proved or disproved. And
when the observations came in, the models were right. The forecasts weren’t
just predictions of global
average warming – they also predicted geographical patterns of
warming that we see today.
Syukuro Manabe was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in
2021. Johan
Nilsson/TT News Agency/AFP
These early predictions starting in the 1960s emanated
largely out of a single, somewhat obscure government laboratory outside
Princeton, New Jersey: the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. And many of
the discoveries bear the fingerprints of one particularly prescient and
persistent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in
physics for his work.
Manabe’s models, based in the physics of the atmosphere and ocean, forecast the world we now see while also drawing a blueprint for today’s climate models and their ability to simulate our large-scale climate. While models have limitations, it is this track record of success that gives us confidence in interpreting the changes we’re seeing now, as well as predicting changes to come.
Forecast No. 1: Global warming from CO2
Manabe’s first assignment in the 1960s at the U.S.
Weather Bureau, in a lab that would become the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
Laboratory, was to accurately model the greenhouse
effect – to show how greenhouse gases trap radiant heat in Earth’s
atmosphere. Since the oceans would freeze over without the greenhouse effect,
this was a key first step in building any kind of credible climate model.
To test his calculations, Manabe created a very simple
climate model. It represented the global atmosphere as a single column of air
and included key
components of climate, such as incoming sunlight, convection from
thunderstorms, and his greenhouse effect model.
Results from Manabe’s 1967 single-column global warming
simulations show that as carbon dioxide (CO2) increases, the surface and lower
atmosphere warm, while the stratosphere cools. Syukuro
Manabe and Richard Wetherald, 1967
Despite its simplicity, the model reproduced Earth’s
overall climate quite well. Moreover, it showed that doubling carbon dioxide
concentrations in the atmosphere would cause the planet to warm by about 5.4
degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius).
This estimate of Earth’s climate sensitivity, published
in 1967, has remained essentially
unchanged in the many decades since and captures the overall magnitude
of observed global warming. Right now the world is about halfway to doubling atmospheric
carbon dioxide, and the global temperature has warmed by about 2.2 F (1.2
C) – right in the ballpark of what Manabe predicted.
Other greenhouses gases such as methane, as well as the
ocean’s delayed response to global warming, also affect temperature rise, but
the overall conclusion is unchanged: Manabe got Earth’s climate sensitivity
about right.
Forecast No. 2: Stratospheric cooling
The surface and lower atmosphere in Manabe’s
single-column model warmed as carbon dioxide concentrations rose, but in what
was a surprise at the time, the model’s stratosphere actually cooled.
Temperatures in this upper region of the atmosphere,
between roughly 7.5 and 31 miles (12 and 50 km) in altitude, are governed by a
delicate balance between the absorption of ultraviolet sunlight by ozone and
release of radiant heat by carbon dioxide. Increase the carbon dioxide, and the
atmosphere traps more radiant heat near the surface but actually releases
more radiant heat from the stratosphere, causing it to cool.
This cooling of the stratosphere has been detected
over decades of
satellite measurements and is a distinctive fingerprint of carbon
dioxide-driven warming, as warming from other causes such as changes in
sunlight or El Niño cycles do not yield stratospheric
cooling.
Forecast No. 3: Arctic amplification
Manabe used his single-column model as the basis for a
prototype quasi-global model, which simulated only a fraction of the globe. It
also simulated only the upper 100 meters or so of the ocean and neglected the
effects of ocean currents.
In 1975, Manabe published global
warming simulations with this quasi-global model and again found stratospheric
cooling. But he also made a new discovery – that the Arctic warms significantly
more than the rest of the globe, by a factor of two to three times.
Map from
IPCC 6th Assessment Report
This “Arctic amplification” turns out to be a robust
feature of global warming, occurring in present-day observations and subsequent simulations. A
warming Arctic furthermore means a decline
in Arctic sea ice, which has become one of the most visible and dramatic
indicators of a changing climate.
Forecast No. 4: Land-ocean contrast
In the early 1970s, Manabe was also working to couple
his atmospheric model to a first-of-its-kind dynamical model of the
full world ocean built by oceanographer Kirk Bryan.
Around 1990, Manabe and Bryan used this coupled
atmosphere-ocean model to simulate
global warming over realistic continental geography, including the effects
of the full ocean circulation. This led to a slew of insights, including the
observation that land generally warms more than ocean, by a factor of about 1.5.
As with Arctic amplification, this land-ocean contrast
can be seen in observed
warming. It can also be explained
from basic scientific principles and is roughly analogous to the way a
dry surface, such as pavement, warms more than a moist surface, such as soil,
on a hot, sunny day.
The contrast has consequences for land-dwellers like
ourselves, as every degree of global warming will be amplified over land.
Forecast No. 5: Delayed Southern Ocean warming
Perhaps the biggest surprise from Manabe’s models came
from a region most of us rarely think about: the Southern Ocean.
This vast, remote body of water encircles Antarctica and
has strong eastward winds whipping across it unimpeded, due to the absence of
land masses in the southern midlatitudes. These winds continually draw
up deep ocean waters to the surface.
Winds around Antarctica contribute to upwelling of cold
deep water that keeps the Southern Ocean cool while also raising nutrients to
the surface waters. NOAA
Manabe and colleagues found that the Southern Ocean warmed very slowly when
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased because the surface waters
were continually being replenished by these upwelling abyssal waters, which
hadn’t yet warmed.
This delayed Southern Ocean warming is also visible in the temperature observations.
What does all this add up to?
Looking back on Manabe’s work more than half a century
later, it’s clear that even early climate models captured the broad strokes of
global warming.
Manabe’s models simulated these patterns decades before
they were observed: Arctic Amplification was simulated in 1975 but only observed with confidence in 2009,
while stratospheric cooling was simulated in 1967 but definitively observed only
recently.
Climate models have their limitations, of course. For instance, they cannot predict regional climate change as well as people would like. But the fact that climate science, like any field, has significant unknowns should not blind us to what we do know. -The Conversation
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