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From a high chair to the ocean floor, Can the Seas Survive Us? in Norfolk’s Sainsbury Centre explores our watery world and the climate crisis

One of the most striking things that will be on display at an exhibition in Norfolk this weekend is an oak chair. Ordinary enough, except that it is elevated high in the air. Why? Because this is where it will need to be in 2100, given rising sea levels in the Netherlands, where it was made by the artist Boris Maas.

Entitled The Urge to Sit Dry (2018), there is another like it in the office of the Dutch environment minister in The Hague, a constant reminder of the real and immediate threat posed to the country by rising sea levels.

The Dutch artist Boris Maas with his 2018 work The Urge to Sit Dry, which uses wooden blocks to lift the chair to the height it needs to be to sit above predicted sea levels

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Several US states want to criminalise atmospheric experiments, which could prevent meteorological studies

Conspiracy theories about weather manipulation go back centuries and are more dangerous than you might think.

In the ninth century, St Agobard of Lyon wrote a treatise called On Hail and Thunder attacking the popular superstition that storm-raisers could call up tempests at will. Bizarrely, these magicians were supposedly paid by aerial sailors from the land of Magonia, who sailed in the clouds and collected the crops destroyed by hail and storms.

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Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, reframed his agency’s mission, saying it is to make it cheaper to buy cars, heat homes and run businesses.

Activists horrified as EPA reverses pollution laws and reviews landmark finding that gases harm public health

Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health.

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Climate models are the main tool scientists use to assess how much the Earth’s temperature will change given an increase in fossil fuel pollutants in the atmosphere. As a climate scientist, I’ve used them in all my research projects, including one predicting a change in Southwestern US precipitation patterns. But how exactly did climate models come to be?  

Behind climate models today lie decades of both scientific and computer technological advancement. These models weren’t created overnight—they are the cumulative work of the world’s brightest climate scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists, and physicists since the 1940s.  

Believe it or not, climate models are actually part of the driving force for the advancement of computers! Did you know that the second purpose for the world’s first electronic computer was to make a weather forecast? Predicting the weather and climate is a complex problem that combines computer science and physics. It is a form of applied mathematics that unites so many different fields. 

This is the first blog in a three-part series. This first one focuses on the history of climate models; the second will discuss what a climate model is and what is it used for; and in the third blog I will explore how climate scientists integrate the rapidly-changing field of Machine Learning into climate science.  

Predicting the weather and climate is a physics problem 

Scientists hypothesized early on that we could predict the weather and longer-term climate using a set of equations that describe the motion and energy transfer of the atmosphere. Because there is often confusion about the difference between weather and climate, keep in mind that the climate is just the weather averaged over a long period of time. The atmosphere around us is an invisible fluid (at least to the human eye): we can apply math to that fluid to predict how it will look in the future. Check out this website for a representation of that fluid in motion. 

In 1904, Vilhelm Bjerknes, a founder of modern meteorological forecasting, wrote:  

“If it is true, as every scientist believes, that subsequent atmospheric states develop from the preceding ones according to physical law, then it is apparent that the necessary and sufficient conditions for the rational solution of forecasting problems are: 1) A sufficiently accurate knowledge of the state of the atmosphere at the initial time, 2) A sufficiently accurate knowledge of the laws according to which one state of the atmosphere develops from another.” 

In other words, if we know the right mathematical equations that predict how atmospheric motion and energy transfer work, and we also know how the atmosphere currently looks, then we should be able to predict what the atmosphere will do in the future! 

So why didn’t Vilhelm try to predict the weather in 1904 if he knew it could be done? Well, at the time there was unreliable and poor coverage of observations for how the atmosphere looked. Vilhelm also knew that there would be an immense number of calculations, too many to do by hand, that go into calculating the future of the state of the atmosphere. 

It wasn’t until the early 1920s that Lewis Fry Richardson, an English mathematician and physicist, succeeded in doing what had been, until then, thought of as impossible. Using a set of equations that describe atmospheric movement, he predicted the weather eight hours into the future. How long did it take him to carry out those calculations? Six weeks. So you can see it wasn’t possible to make any reliable weather prediction with only calculations done by hand. 

Computers changed the forecasting game 

So how can we predict the weather and climate so well today? Computers! In 1945, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was invented in the United States. ENIAC was the first electronic computer that could perform an impressive number of calculations in seconds (here, “impressive” is relative to the era, as ENIAC could make about 5,000 calculations per second, while today’s iPhone can make billions of calculations per second). Note that there were computers before ENIAC, but they didn’t rely on electricity and weren’t as complex. 

Originally, this electronic computer was used for nuclear fallout calculations, but believe it or not, the second use for ENIAC was to perform the calculations necessary to predict the weather. Why? Because weather prediction was the perfect overlap of applied mathematics and physics that required the quick calculations of a computer. 

In 1946, one year after the ENIAC was finished, John von Neumann, a Princeton mathematician who was a pioneer of early computers, organized a conference of meteorologists. According to Jule Charney, a leading 20th century meteorologist, “[to] von Neumann, meteorology was par excellence the applied branch of mathematics and physics that stood the most to gain from high-speed computation.” 

Von Neumann knew that with ENIAC we could start predicting both the short-term weather and the longer-term climate. In 1950, a successful weather prediction for North America was run on ENIAC, setting the stage for the future of weather and climate prediction.  

Two of the ENIAC programmers preparing the computer for Demonstration Day in February 1946. US Army Photo from the ARL Technical Library archives. Left: Betty Jennings, right: Frances Bilas.

Who were the six programmers that ran these calculations? Jean Bartik, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum, all women mathematicians recruited by the military in 1942 as so-called “human computers”. I mention this briefly here because women’s contributions to the advancement of computer technology and weather forecasting is often overlooked. During Women’s History Month it is even more important to elevate and remind folks of their critical contributions. 

The first climate model 

The weather forecast run on ENIAC in 1950 was for only a short period of time (24 hours) and included only North America. To successfully model the climate, we would need a model to simulate decades of Earth time that covers at least one hemisphere of the Earth. 

The first general circulation model (GCM)—what climate scientists call climate models— was developed by Norman Phillips in 1956 using a more sophisticated computer than ENIAC that could handle more calculations. However, this GCM was primitive in nature. 

After Phillips successfully demonstrated the climate system could be modeled, four institutions in the United States—UCLA, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) in Princeton, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory—independently developed the first atmosphere-only GCMs in the 1960s. Having four models developed slightly differently contributed to the robustness of the discipline early on in climate modeling. 

And thus, the age of climate modeling was born. These GCMs could predict the future state of the atmosphere and its circulation given any change to atmospheric composition (such as heat-trapping pollutants), which is the main application of GCMs to this day. 

Today’s climate models 

GCMs are much more sophisticated today than they were in the 1960s. They have higher resolutions (meaning they perform more calculations per area), they are informed by better physical approximations, and they can replicate the climate much better. With each decade since their conception, different earth system models that simulate phenomena such as carbon cycling, vegetation, and aerosols have been added, improving GCM complexity and accuracy. Present-day GCMs consider changes in not just the atmosphere, but also changes in the ocean, the land, and sea-ice (see figure below). 

Modern climate models incorporate multiple sub-components that simulate land, ocean, and sea-ice conditions to inform modeling of atmospheric conditions.

When scientists run a climate model, they are actually running four different models: one for the atmosphere, one for the ocean, one for the land, and one for sea-ice, simultaneously. These four models then communicate with each other through something called a “coupler” during the calculation stage.  

So, for example, if the ocean model says the temperature of the ocean surface changes by 3°C given a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, this information is then relayed to the atmospheric model, which can then respond and change the atmospheric circulation based on that temperature change.  

For more information on what a climate model is, how it works, and how climate scientists use them, check out my climate model explainer blog coming soon.

Climate models improve incrementally through decades of scientific work 

Climate models are some of the most reliable models in existence because they have been built upon, tested, and corrected for decades. And while there are some problems we’re still working on correcting, they can replicate the climate system overall with incredible skill and accuracy.  

Climate models are at the foundation of the scientific consensus around climate change. And at UCS, we use climate models to advance our understanding of the climate system in order to predict how communities are affected by a changing climate, and, importantly, to know who to hold accountable for the climate crisis.

Here is what we know about the billions in funds that have led to federal investigations, lawsuits and frozen bank accounts for climate nonprofit groups.

Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella group for energy and environmental efforts funded by Mr. Gates, is resetting for the Trump era.

With apparent support for airport expansion and fossil fuel exploration, it may look as if the party is abandoning the climate challenge, but it’s just pantomime

There’s no getting away from it: in the last few months we’ve seen leaders and corporations do very real damage to the energy transition. Donald Trump has paused future spending on clean energy infrastructure and he’s cancelled decarbonisation targets. And the new European Commission has loudly promised to cut environmental “red tape”.

If you only read the headlines, you might think we’re facing the same issue here in the UK. But overall, Labour has remained committed to its long-term climate goals. Someone close to No 10 has said the prime minister wants to allow a massive new North Sea fossil fuel development (but they know this would still need to pass a climate assessment). The government has invited Heathrow to apply to expand (knowing it will need to fulfil a myriad of conditions). There are reports that Labour could move funds away from carbon capture and storage (but that’s always been a speculative technology). And there were reports that GB Energy’s funding might be cut (but that might be nonsense, or it might just mean spending being moved around government). More concretely, it is moving fast towards supporting a second runway at Gatwick (knowing that planning conditions, and then long political and legal battles, could scupper the scheme).

Richard Power Sayeed is a historian of modern Britain. He is currently researching the politics of energy, and is the author of 1997: The Future that Never Happened

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An internal memo directs the closure of offices designed to ease the heavy pollution faced by poor and minority communities.

The US president is making energy deals with Japan and Ukraine, and in Africa has even touted resurrecting coal

Donald Trump’s repeated mantra of “drill, baby, drill” demands that more oil and gas be extracted in the United States, but the president has set his sights on an even broader goal: keeping the world hooked on planet-heating fossil fuels for as long as possible.

In deals being formulated with countries such as Japan and Ukraine, Trump is using US leverage in tariffs and military aid to bolster the flow of oil and gas around the world. In Africa, his administration has even touted the resurrection of coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, to bring energy to the continent.

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Injecting pollutants into the atmosphere to reflect the sun would be extremely dangerous, but the UK is funding field trials

Some years ago in the pages of the Guardian, we sounded the alarm about the increasing attention being paid to solar geoengineering – a barking mad scheme to cancel global heating by putting pollutants in the atmosphere that dim the sun by reflecting some sunlight back to space.

In one widely touted proposition, fleets of aircraft would continually inject sulphur compounds into the upper atmosphere, simulating the effects of a massive array of volcanoes erupting continuously. In essence, we have broken the climate by releasing gigatonnes of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide, and solar geoengineering proposes to “fix” it by breaking a very different part of the climate system.

Raymond T Pierrehumbert FRS is professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford. He is an author of the 2015 US National Academy of Sciences report on climate intervention

Michael E Mann ForMemRS is presidential distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis

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If you don’t believe the scientists, will you believe the insurance companies?

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My homeplace has experienced four natural disasters in eight years. But I’d never seen the like of this bird before, vibrantly green and startlingly beautiful

We were midway through our cyclone preparation when my mother broke her leg. She stepped into her bedroom to retrieve something, tripped and fell, and that was that. My mother is 74 and hardy, so this sudden break took us by surprise. Once I got her home, leg in brace, we’d lost significant time, and my household was down to one functional human: me.

This is the fourth natural disaster I’ve experienced in the last eight years. One-in-100-year floods (2017), unprecedented bushfires (2019), one-in-1,000-year floods (2022) and now Cyclone Alfred. Cyclones are a new threat. I’ve lived in my homeplace, in northern New South Wales, for almost 50 years and we’ve never had a cyclone cross land in our vicinity. We were, as they say, in uncharted waters.

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Swings between drought and floods striking from Dallas to Shanghai, while Madrid and Cairo are among cities whose climate has flipped

Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis intensifies, a report has revealed.

Dozens more cities, including Lucknow, Madrid and Riyadh have suffered a climate “flip” in the last 20 years, switching from dry to wet extremes, or vice versa. The report analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected ones, and found that 95% of them showed a distinct trend towards wetter or drier weather.

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Dozens of nonprofit groups have been unable to access the federal government’s payment system. The E.P.A. hasn’t explained why.

The added capacity for the year was the most from any single source in more than two decades.

Alfred is being used as the latest front in an ideological war, but facts are relevant to how we prepare for a climate-changed future

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It’s not a good time for climate science. The Trump administration has sacked more than a thousand staff from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the country’s leading agency for weather forecasting and climate science, potentially damaging its ability to do lifesaving work forecasting hurricanes and other extreme weather events. The New York Times reported plans are under way to fire another 1,000. If true, that will take the cuts to about 20% of the workforce.

On Monday, it was announced Nasa was axing its chief scientist, Katherine Calvin, who had been appointed to lead the agency’s work on climate change. In trademark Donald Trump/Elon Musk style, there appears little care or sense in where cuts have been made. It’s destruction for destruction’s sake, with tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers underpinning the understanding of climate science dismissed as a “hoax” or, somehow, “woke”. As in most areas, what happens in the US on forecasting and science capability will have an impact beyond its borders.

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About 19 positions will be cut, including those in offices focused on technology policy and diversity, equity and inclusion.

To applause from oil and gas executives, Chris Wright said natural gas was preferable to renewable energy and climate change was a “side effect of building the modern world.”

The justices declined to hear unusual arguments from Republican-led states that sought to end lawsuits against energy companies over their role in global warming.