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The Discovery of Global Warming                      August 2003

Climate interactions: this 1974 summary of feedbacks was a pioneering attempt to show the complexity of the system. Nowhere did biology appear explicitly...

... whereas a mid-1980s "wiring diagram" put biology in the center. An extract is below; the whole diagram can be seen by clicking here.



Upper: Partly inspired by a private communication from W.D. Sellers. Reproduced with permission from W.W. Kellogg and S.H. Schneider, Science 186 (1974), p. 1164, copyright © 1974 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Also called the "Bretherton Diagram," see Berrien Moore III Interview by Rebecca Wright, Earth System Science at 20 Oral History Project, NASA, 2011, online here. Lower: H.J. Schellnhuber, Nature 402 suppl. (1999) p. C21, redrawn from Arthur Fisher, Mosaic 19 (1988), pp. 56-57. All material on this page copyright © 2003 American Institute of Physics.