Foundational Papers in Complexity Science pp. 979–1004
DOI: 10.37911/9781947864535.32
A Faulty Foundation Supports a Powerful Idea: Mikhail Budyko and His Work on the Ice–Albedo Feedback
Author: Daniel P. Schrag, Harvard University and Santa Fe Institute
Excerpt
Introduction
In 1969, the Soviet geophysicist Mikhail Budyko published this short article in the journal Tellus. It contained a discussion of how changes in both solar radiation and volcanic activity on Earth may have created the changes in climate observed in the geologic past, in particular trying to explain the Pleistocene ice ages. This was a slightly obscure topic for Budyko, who had already published many seminal works on climate physics and the heat budget of the Earth; his 1956 book Heat Balance of the Earth’s Surface is widely credited as offering a more quantitative approach to climatology relative to much preceding work. Moreover, the central argument in the 1969 Tellus article—the idea that changes in volcanic activity were primarily responsible for past variations in Earth’s climate—is false. Given his extraordinary contributions to physical climatology, one might think that this paper could easily be forgiven and overlooked. And yet it remains Budyko’s most-cited work published in English, a profound influence on multiple areas within climatology, including the history of Earth’s glaciations, the sensitivity of Earth’s climate in the future to changes in glaciation, and the risks that nuclear war could lead to a global climate catastrophe called “nuclear winter.” The story of how such a paper could offer a foundation to multiple ideas in climate science yields insight into how science advances, one (erroneous) idea at a time.
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