Climate Bibliography, Part 1 - The Early Years (1824 - 1988)

I thought it would be beneficial to produce an annotated bibliography of important scientific works in the field of climate science. Obviously I can't make this list exhaustive, but I'm planning to generate several bibliographies, mostly on specific topics in climate science that interest me, and I plan to periodically modify them as new papers are written (or as I discover papers written in the past). I thought it best to cover the early years of climate science as a historical survey. My first post will cover 164 years of  climate science from Fourier in 1824 to Hansen in 1988.

Joseph Fourier

[1] Fourier, Baptiste Joseph (1824). "Remarques générales sur les températures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires," Annales de Chimie et de Physique, 27 (1824) 136–67. Translated by Ebeneser Burgess in the American Journal of Science 32 (1837) 1-20.

Fourier was the first to recognize that the Earth's surface averages much warmer than it should be given its distance from the Sun. He reasoned that there must be some property of the Earth's atmosphere that trapped heat near the surface to keep it warmer than is effective temperature. While Fourier didn't know about the greenhouse properties of some atmospheric gases, he was the first to propose what we now understand to be the "greenhouse effect." The atmosphere is transparent to solar energy entering the climate system but traps heat radiated from the surface, slowing its escape into space.

John Tyndall

[2] Tyndall, John (1859). "VII. Note on the transmission of radiant heat through gaseous bodies". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. 10. The Royal Society: 37–39. 

Tyndall was the first to develop an experimental apparatus to observe the heat-trapping properties of various gases, including CO2. His description of the greenhouse effect is still valid today. "The bearing of this experiment upon the action of planetary atmospheres is obvious. The solar heat possesses, in a far higher degree than that of the lime light, the power of crossing an atmosphere; but, and when the heat is absorbed by the planet, it is so changed in quality that the rays emanating from the planet cannot get with the same freedom back into space. Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet. In the admirable paper of M. Pouillet already referred to, this action is regarded as the cause of the lower atmospheric strata being warmer than the higher ones; and Mr. Hopkins has shown the possible influence of such atmospheres upon the life of a planet situated at a great distance from the sun."

Svante Arrhenius

[3] Arrhenius, S.A. (1896) On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground. Philosophical Magazine, 41, 237-276.

Arrhenius' landmark paper used temperature data available to him to approximate how much warmer the Earth's surface is than its effective temperature. Since he didn't have access to temperature data near the poles, his estimate of 15 °C was a little too high, but he was able to quantify the logarithmic relationship between CO2 and GMST. He estimated that doubling CO2 resulted in 4-6 °C warming. Later studies would lower this range a bit, but Arrhenius' work was a remarkable achievement.

Guy Callendar

[4] Callendar, G.S. (1938), The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature. Q.J.R. Meteorol. Soc., 64: 223-240. 

Guy Callendar built on the work of Arrhenius and identified the human fingerprint of increasing CO2 from human industrial processes on the previous 50 years of global temperatures. This paper was underappreciated in its day, but it's notable in hindsight, not just for the what he was able discern from the data he had available to him but also because of his influence on Gilbert Plass and Charles Keeling.

Gilbert Plass

[5a] Plass, G.N. (1956), The influence of the 15μ carbon-dioxide band on the atmospheric infra-red cooling rate. Q.J.R. Meteorol. Soc., 82: 310-324. 

[5b] Plass, G.N. (1956), The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change. Tellus, 8: 140-154. 

Plass has two papers that I consider worth mentioning here. [5a] above was a thorough rebuttal of Ångström, who believed that CO2 saturation would limit the continued increasein temperature with increasing CO2. [5b] also lowered Arrhenius' sensitivity estimate to 3 C. There were a couple calculation errors in his paper, which happened to roughly cancel each other out, but his estimate that ECS = 3 °C remains the central estimate for climate sensitivity to this day.

Charles Keeling

[6a] Keeling C.D. The concentration and isotopic abundances of atmospheric carbon dioxide in rural areas. Geochimica and Cosmochimica Acta. 1958;13(4):323–334.

[6b] Keeling, C.D. Bacastow, R.B., Bainbridge, A.E., Ekdahl, C.A., Jr., Guenther, P.R., Waterman, L.S. and Chin, J.F.S. (1976), Atmospheric carbon dioxide variations at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. Tellus, 28: 538-551. 

Keeling's work documented the rapid increase in CO2 in the atmosphere through the observatory established at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. While scientists understood that the human combustion of fossil fuels was responsible for increasing CO2 concentrations, Keeling's work demonstrated that lock-step increase in concentrations with rapidly growing emissions.

Suko Manabe

[7] Manabe, S., & Wetherald, R. T. (1967). Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity, Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 24(3), 241-259. 

Manabe's paper was probably the first successful global climate model (though note Norman Phillips' general circulation model). Not only did it do a good job of modeling the Earth's atmosphere, this paper also laid out several theoretical predictions that have been observed ever since. For instance, MW67 predicted that the stratosphere would cool while the troposphere warmed in response to GHG forcings, and that has been observed by satellites since 1979.

Jule Charney

[8] Charney, Jule; Arakawa, Akio; Baker, D. James; Bolin, Bert; Dickinson, Robert E; Goody, Richard M; Leith, Cecil; Stommel, Henry; Wunsch, Carl (1979). Carbon Dioxide and Climate : A Scientific Assessment. National Academies Press.

The so-called "Charney Report" did not discover anything new, but it was an important meta analysis that synthesized the state of climate science at the end of the 1970s. Manabe's work arrived at an ECS estimate below 3 °C, and Hansen's work (below) arrived at a value above 3 °C. The Charney Report synthesis proposed a value for ECS of 3 ±1.5 °C. This is commonly referred to now as "Charney sensitivity." That central estimate has stood the test of time °C, though current evidence has allowed scientists to constrain the range to between 2.5 and 4 °C.

James Hansen

[9a] Hansen, J., D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell, 1981: Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Science, 213, 957-966.

[9b] Hansen, J.E., and S. Lebedeff, 1987: Global trends of measured surface air temperature. J. Geophys. Res., 92, 13345-13372.

[9c] Hansen, J., I. Fung, A. Lacis, D. Rind, S. Lebedeff, R. Ruedy, G. Russell, and P. Stone (1988), Global climate changes as forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies three-dimensional model, J. Geophys. Res., 93(D8), 9341–9364.

Hansen's work has been incredibly influential. His climate model, which he first described in 1981, arrived at an ECS near 4 C, and the published model in 1988 continues to make accurate predictions of GMST increases when compared to actual forcings since 1988. Hansen also discovered [9b] that temperatures from station data correlate well over significant distances, so if GMST data is reported as anomalies, rather than as absolute temperatures, the confidence intervals can be significantly reduced and reliable trends can be calculated with fewer weather stations.

Honorable Mention: Eunice Foote

[10] Foote, Eunice.  “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays”, in American Journal of Art and Science, 2nd Series, v. XXII/no. LXVI, November 1856, p. 382-383.

This paper is often cited as an early discovery of the greenhouse effect (her work preceded that of Tyndall). However, the experimental setup was not designed to discover the greenhouse effect. For example, her containers were made of glass, which is opaque to IR light, so the wavelengths absorbed by CO2 would not have caused her containers to warm. It was an important climate paper in its own right, though, so I think it's worth putting on the list.