Climate science has been rapidly advancing in recent years, but the foundations were laid hundreds of years ago.
In the 1820s, French scientist Joseph Fourier theorized that Earth must have some way of keeping heat and that the atmosphere may play some role. In 1850, American scientist Eunice Newton Foote put thermometers(温度计)in glass bottles and experimented with placing them in sunlight. Inside the bottles, Foote compared dry air, wet air, N2, O2 and CO, and found that the bottle containing humid air warmed up more and stayed hotter longer than the bottle containing dry air,and that it was followed by the bottle containing CO2. In 1859, Irish scientist John Tyndall began measuring how much heat different gases in the atmosphere absorb. And in 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius concluded that more CO2 in the atmosphere would cause the planet to heat up: These findings planted some of the earliest seeds of climate science.
The first critical breakthrough happened in 1967 when Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald connected energy absorbed by the atmosphere to the air movement vertically over Earth.They built a model which first included all the main physical processes related to climate changes. The predictions and the explanations based on their model still hold true in the real world almost half a century later.
The model was improved in the 1980s by Klaus Hasselmann who connected short-term weather patterns with long-term climate changes. Hasselmann found that even random weather data could yield insight into broader patterns.
“ The greatest uncertainty in the model remains what human beings will do. Figuring it out is 1,000 times harder than understanding the physics behind climate changes,” Manabe said.“ There are many things we can do to prevent climate change. The whole question is whether people will realize that something which will happen in20 or 30 years is something you have to respond to now.”
So, it’s up to us to solve the problem that these pioneers helped the world understand.
【小题1】What does the word “humid” underlined in paragraph 2 mean?| A．Cool. | B．Cold. | C．Dry. | D．Wet. |
| A．He found that CO2 causes global warming. |
| B．He invented a unique measuring instrument. |
| C．He improved Manabe and Wetherald’s model. |
| D．He built a reliable model on climate change. |
| A．The biggest problem with the climate model. |
| B．The necessity for human beings to take action now. |
| C．The challenge of understanding climate change. |
| D．Measures to be taken to prevent climate change. |
| A．Negative Effects of the Global Warming |
| B．Historic Breakthroughs in Climate Science |
| C．Main Causes Leading to Climate Change |
| D．Difficulties of Preventing Climate Change |
