The long-run energy balance of the planet, and what is perturbing it.
12 topics · 14 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Discovery of Global Warming
Spencer R. Weart · 2003
Traces how climate science moved from a scattered, doubted hypothesis to a robust consensus over a century of individually unglamorous measurements,…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
IPCC Sixth Assessment Synthesis Report
IPCC · 2023
The consensus statement of the physical evidence on climate change, with explicit confidence levels attached to each claim.
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground
Svante Arrhenius · 1896
Hand-calculates, without a computer, how much the surface would warm if atmospheric CO2 were halved or doubled, the first quantitative…
+8 more at this level
12 of 14 works
Spencer R. Weart
Traces how climate science moved from a scattered, doubted hypothesis to a robust consensus over a century of individually unglamorous measurements, arguing the science solidified well before the politics caught up.
link checked 17 Sept 2026IPCC
The consensus statement of the physical evidence on climate change, with explicit confidence levels attached to each claim.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas C. Peterson, Peter A. Stott & Stephanie Herring
Opens an annual practice of testing, event by event, how much a specific year's floods, heatwaves and droughts were made more likely by a warming climate, rather than asking the older, harder question of whether climate change is real at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026National Research Council
Surveys solar geoengineering proposals and concludes none is ready for deployment, urging research into the risks and governance questions rather than either dismissal or premature use.
link checked 17 Sept 2026IPCC
Assesses every major pathway for cutting emissions across energy, industry, transport and land use, and finds the gap between pledged policy and a 1.5-degree-compatible path still widening.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Svante Arrhenius
Hand-calculates, without a computer, how much the surface would warm if atmospheric CO2 were halved or doubled, the first quantitative greenhouse-effect estimate and the direct ancestor of every climate model since.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles David Keeling
Reports the first years of continuous CO2 measurement at Mauna Loa, showing a seasonal breathing cycle riding on top of a year-on-year rise that has not stopped since.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Syukuro Manabe & Richard T. Wetherald
Builds the first radiative-convective model to hold relative humidity fixed while doubling carbon dioxide, and gets a warming of about two degrees — the first physically grounded climate-sensitivity estimate.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026James D. Hays, John Imbrie & Nicholas J. Shackleton
Matches oscillations in ocean-sediment oxygen isotopes to the calculated wobbles of Earth's orbit and shows the timing lines up closely enough to make Milankovitch's astronomical theory the accepted explanation for the pacing of the ice ages.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jule Charney et al.
The first National Academy of Sciences panel to put a number on climate sensitivity — 1.5 to 4.5 degrees for doubled CO2 — a range that stood for four decades of subsequent research.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul J. Crutzen
Argues that if serious emissions cuts keep failing politically, deliberately injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the planet deserves real research funding despite its risks, reopening a subject climate science had avoided discussing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Stefan Rahmstorf
Fits a simple statistical relationship between past temperature and past sea-level rise and projects it forward, producing sea-level estimates for 2100 well above the physically modelled projections of its time.
link checked 17 Sept 2026This subject genuinely sits in more than one domain. These fields approach the same ground with different methods.