2010 Edwards A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming

Briefing: The Evolution of Global Meteorology and Climate Science

This briefing summarizes key themes and facts from "2010 Edwards_Vast Machine_Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming KPDFc.pdf," focusing on the historical development of global meteorological observation, the rise of climate science, and the interplay between scientific progress, technological innovation, and political imperatives.

1. The Grand Vision: From Local Observation to Global Systems

From its earliest conceptualizations, meteorology has harbored a global ambition. John Ruskin's 1839 vision of a "vast machine" illustrates this foundational desire: "The Meteorological Society, therefore, has been formed not for a city, nor for a kingdom, but for the world. It wishes to be the central point, the moving power, of a vast machine...It desires to have at its command, at stated periods, perfect systems of methodical and simultaneous observations; it wishes its influence and its power to be omnipresent over the globe so that it may be able to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere on every point on its surface." This aspiration underscores the inherent global nature of atmospheric phenomena and the necessity of coordinated, worldwide data collection.

Early attempts at networked observation, like the Accademia del Cimento (1654-1667) and the Palatine Meteorological Society (1780-1795), demonstrate a long-standing drive for standardized, simultaneous observations across regions. These efforts laid the groundwork for modern meteorological networks by establishing early forms of data sharing and standardization.

2. Informational and Infrastructural Globalism

The text introduces two crucial concepts: "informational globalism" and "infrastructural globalism." Informational globalism refers to the ambition to gather and disseminate information on a global scale. Infrastructural globalism, more profoundly, describes "projects for permanent, unified, world-scale institutional-technological complexes that generate globalist information not merely by accident, as a byproduct of other goals, but by design." Meteorology, through its historical development, exemplifies this transition, moving from voluntary international cooperation to the establishment of enduring, reliable global infrastructures. This "infrastructural globalism" in meteorology aimed to create "permanent sociotechnical systems for monitoring the weather, modeling its processes, and preserving planetary data as scientific memory."

The development of weather maps in the 19th century, particularly Alexander von Humboldt's isotherms (1817) and Heinrich Wilhelm Brandes's isobars (1816-1819), were early attempts to visualize and understand global atmospheric patterns, moving beyond local observations to a systemic view. Matthew Maury's efforts starting in 1848 to collect and map ships' logs of winds and currents at sea represent a significant early push to build a global dataset, highlighting the need for standard metrics and practices.

3. The Role of Technology and State Sponsorship

The evolution of meteorology is inextricably linked to technological advancements and state involvement. The telegraph network in the 19th century was a transformative technology, enabling the rapid transmission of weather data across vast distances. This led to the establishment of national weather services, often backed by governments and military forces, recognizing the practical importance of weather prediction for shipping, agriculture, and military operations. Joseph Henry's establishment of the US network in 1849, leveraging commercial telegraph companies for free data transmission, illustrates this symbiotic relationship between science and the state. By 1900, "many countries possessing substantial telegraph networks also sponsored national weather services that conducted empirically based synoptic weather forecasting."

The advent of shortwave radio in the 1920s further expanded the reach of data networks, "untethered the data network from telegraph cables," enabling a more planetary monitoring system.

4. International Cooperation and Its Challenges

Despite the global nature of weather, international cooperation faced significant hurdles, primarily due to national sovereignty and financial constraints. The International Meteorological Organization (IMO), formed in 1873, was an early attempt at international governance but remained "little more than a skeleton, a rough and weak framework for action that mostly took place at the national level." It lacked policy-making powers and a substantial budget. Proposals for truly global observing networks, like Christophorus Buys Ballot's idea for island weather stations in the 1870s, were rejected as too expensive.

The IMO's struggle to achieve intergovernmental status before World War II, despite drafting a World Meteorological Convention, highlights the tension between national priorities and the need for global collaboration. However, post-WWII, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), operating within the UN system, achieved intergovernmental status, signifying a "new commitment by governments throughout the world to link their weather services through shared investment in a worldwide weather network." Even then, the WMO's language was cautious, only promising to "promote," "encourage," "facilitate," etc., rather than dictate to its member states, who were only required to "do their utmost" to implement decisions.

5. The Rise of Climate Science and the Concept of Climate Change

Climatology initially developed as a more descriptive field compared to theoretical meteorology. Julius von Hann's 1883 "Handbook of Climatology" defined climate as the "sum total of the meteorological conditions insofar as they affect animal or vegetable life," though he also emphasized it as a purely physical phenomenon. Hann, while skeptical about the accuracy of global averages for secular climate change, recognized climate as a global system, publishing "The Earth as a Whole: Its Atmosphere and Hydrosphere" in 1896. He noted that early climatologists observed "the global average temperature does not remain stable over the entire year, but instead rises from January to June."

Early discussions of climate change were present even in the 19th century. Eduard Bruckner, a German geographer, noted a 35-year periodic cycle of climatic variation and even "claimed that human-induced warming, desertification, and drought were already occurring in regions of Europe and North America as a result of deforestation." These early concerns were largely regional, with broader planetary anthropogenic impacts only gaining attention later.

Key scientific discoveries laid the groundwork for understanding climate change:

• John Tyndall (1859): Demonstrated the heat-retention capacity of gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide, identifying them as "greenhouse gases." He speculated these gases "could be responsible for 'all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal.'"
• Milutin Milankovic (1920s): Explained recurring large-scale climatic changes (like ice ages) through the confluence of three major astronomical cycles: Earth's orbital eccentricity, axial tilt, and axial precession.
• Willard Libby and Ernest Anderson (1950): Created a global "carbon inventory" and estimated natural radiocarbon distribution.
• Hans Suess (1953, 1955): Estimated ocean carbon absorption rates and showed that recently harvested wood contained less radiocarbon due to "dilution" from burning fossil fuels, revisiting the question of atmospheric CO2 retention.

6. The Computing Revolution and Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP)

The post-World War II era saw a dramatic shift with the advent of electronic computers. Vilhelm Bjerknes's early 20th-century work on the "primitive equations of motion and state" paved the way for "weather by the numbers." John von Neumann was a pivotal figure, seeing weather prediction as a fluid dynamics problem akin to the hydrogen bomb and actively pursuing its computer application. His interest was also driven by Cold War military objectives, envisioning weather as a potential weapon.

The IAS Meteorology Project, funded by US weather services, aimed to develop computer forecast methods, anticipating that "numerical weather prediction might lead to weather control." Early models, like Phillips's 1950 experiment on the IAS computer with just 1 kilobyte of main memory, represented simplified atmospheric conditions but demonstrated the potential of NWP.

The development of General Circulation Models (GCMs) further refined these capabilities. Innovations like spectral methods, which conceptualize atmospheric motion as interacting waves, offered significant mathematical advantages over finite-difference schemes, especially for global-scale simulations. Despite initial computational costs, their efficiency improved, leading to their adoption in NWP and GCMs by the early 1970s.

7. Data Collection in the Digital Age: From Print to Electronic

The increase in data volume significantly impacted meteorological practices. The "synoptic (weather) data network continued to function as a highspeed, centralized system based primarily on professional observers working for national weather services and military forces." Operational forecasts managed "computational friction" by limiting data input and centralizing calculation.

The Cold War spurred the creation of extensive military observing networks, initially designed for classified forecasts and data, but often sharing synoptic data with civilian counterparts. The global fallout-monitoring network, established by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the 1950s to track radioactive debris from nuclear tests, effectively "piggybacked" on the existing global weather data network, becoming a fundamental infrastructure of the Cold War.

The launch of satellites like TIROS-I in 1960 marked a new era, providing a "God's-eye view" of the entire planet and the ability to observe cloud cover globally. This technology, initially linked to military intelligence (e.g., CORONA spy program), quickly became integrated into civilian meteorology. The idea of a "World Weather Watch" (WWW) proposed by US Weather Bureau chief Harry Wexler in the late 1950s, envisioned a truly global observing system leveraging satellites.

The transition from print media (e.g., IGY microcards, WMO data catalogs) to electronic media (magnetic tape, disk) by the mid-1970s revolutionized data storage and exchange, facilitating the creation of comprehensive global datasets. Projects like ICOADS (International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set) merged vast marine records, treating "each cell as a single weather station, integrating all measurements from all platforms within that cell for each analysis period...to create a climatological data set."

8. The Interplay of Models and Data

The "debate often shakes out into a contest: models versus data," as exemplified by physicist Freeman Dyson's 2009 comment: "The climate-studies people always tend to overestimate their models...They forget they are only models." However, the history presented demonstrates a continuous interplay where models drive the need for more and better data, and data inform and refine models.

Reanalysis, a technique developed in the 1980s, exemplifies this synergy. It involved re-processing historical meteorological observations with modern analysis and initialization schemes, integrating data received after operational cutoffs. This approach sought to create a consistent, long-term description of the atmosphere, ocean, and land surfaces, essential for understanding climate trends. Jagadish Shukla's proposal for global reanalysis in the 1980s aimed to "merge all data through a global reanalysis scheme...as analysis and initialization schemes improve," leading to an "Earth system model."

Challenges remain, such as "computational friction" including "round-off error in GCMs," where tiny errors can accumulate over long series of calculations. Differences in floating-point arithmetic implementations across different machines can also lead to slightly varying results.

9. The Atmosphere as a Global Commons

The text highlights the growing recognition of the atmosphere as a shared global resource. The 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTB), while focused on nuclear testing, implicitly acknowledged that "activities conducted within one state might affect not only that state's neighbors but all nations everywhere." This treaty, seen as the "first global environmental treaty," also recognized "the atmosphere as a circulating global commons that could be directly affected on the planetary scale by human activities." Furthermore, the LTB demonstrated how "a global technical monitoring network" could circumvent issues of national sovereignty by exploiting the natural circulation of the atmosphere to detect events within national borders.

In conclusion, the journey of meteorology from isolated observations to a "vast machine" of interconnected global systems is a testament to persistent scientific ambition, technological innovation, and evolving international cooperation. This historical trajectory reveals the continuous effort to understand and manage the planetary atmosphere, laying the foundation for contemporary climate science and global environmental governance.

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