Environment & Energy

Building the Foundation of Climate Science
Program News | April 14, 2025
As we celebrate Earth Month, we are kicking off a series of retrospectives on National Academies’ reports and activities related to climate science.

The National Academies took on the complex challenge of understanding our changing climate decades ago and continue to build on that foundation today. Our expansive portfolio includes work on modeling and other tools to study climate, how to address emissions and lessen impacts, and the human dimension of climate change. To begin, an essential part of that work was the foundational understanding of if, why, and how the Earth’s climate is changing.

In the 1970s, the idea that human activities associated with burning fossil fuels could introduce enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to change the global climate was still largely theoretical. Observations of CO₂ from Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii had been collected for just two decades, providing early evidence that atmospheric greenhouse gases were increasing, but temperature records going back to the 1880s did not yet indicate any definitive trend. The first climate models were being developed by scientists interested in applying relatively new computational capabilities to improve understanding of how the climate system works. These models were cutting edge at the time, but quite primitive compared to today’s models –the models had a simplified representation of the Earth system and had not been widely validated by observations.

The first landmark National Academies climate report, Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, was published in 1979. Often simply called the “Charney Report,” after the chair Jule Charney, it was authored by a group of scientists who gathered at Woods Hole. Drawing on the initial evidence, they developed the first estimates of how much warming might be expected from a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere, a quantity now referred to as the equilibrium climate sensitivity. This report continues to be celebrated as the first assessment of what is known about climate change.

The scientist leading development of one of the climate models featured in the Charney Report, Dr. Suki Manabe, reflected when receiving his Nobel Prize, “I did these experiments out of pure scientific curiosity. I never realized that it would become a problem of such wide-ranging concern for all of human society.”

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