A VAST MACHINE COMPUTER MODELS, CLIMATE DATA, AND THE POLITICS OF GLOBAL WARMING PAUL N. EDWARDS A Vast Machine A Vast Machine Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming Paul N. Edwards The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information on special quantity discounts, email [email protected] .edu. Set in Stone by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edwards, Paul N. A vast machine : computer models, climate data, and the politics of global warming / Paul N. Edwards. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01392-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Weather forecasting. 2. Climatology — History. 3. Meteorology — History. 4. Climatology — Technological innovation. 5. Global temperature changes. I. Title. QC995.E296 2010 551.63 — dc22 2009030678 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 for Steve The meteorologist is impotent if alone; his observations are useless; for they are made upon a point, while the speculations to be derived from them must be on space. The Meteorological Society, therefore, has been formed not for a city, nor for a kingdom, but for the world. It wishes to be the central point, the moving power, of a vast machine, and it feels that unless it can be this, it must be powerless; if it cannot do all it can do nothing. It desires to have at its command, at stated periods, perfect systems of methodical and simultaneous observations; it wishes its infl uence and its power to be omnipresent over the globe so that it may be able to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere on every point on its surface. — John Ruskin (1839) Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xiii 1 Thinking Globally 1 2 Global Space, Universal Time: Seeing the Planetary Atmosphere 27 3 Standards and Networks: International Meteorology and the Ré seau Mondial 49 4 Climatology and Climate Change before World War II 61 5 Friction 83 6 Numerical Weather Prediction 111 7 The Infi nite Forecast 139 8 Making Global Data 187 9 The First WWW 229 10 Making Data Global 251 11 Data Wars 287 12 Reanalysis: The Do-Over 323 13 Parametrics and the Limits of Knowledge 337 14 Simulation Models and Atmospheric Politics, 1960 – 1992 357 15 Signal and Noise: Consensus, Controversy, and Climate Change 397 Conclusion 431 Notes 441 Index 509 Acknowledgments Two people in particular made this book possible. Stephen Schneider brought me into the world of climate science during a professional devel- opment fellowship sponsored by the National Science Foundation. He gave me access to his library, involved me in projects, introduced me to col- leagues, and taught me how climate models work. He also taught me much about the politics of climate change. I learned more from Steve than from anyone else I ’ ve ever worked with. His generosity, both intellectual and personal, is beyond compare. Gabrielle Hecht read many versions of the manuscript, tearing it apart and helping me put it back together. I have no better editor or colleague. At various points she also took notes for me at interviews and provided other assistance, and she kept her confi dence in the project even when I lost my own. Far more than that, though: as the best life partner I can imagine, she taught me the fullest depths of what those words can mean. Without her this book could never have been written. I owe much to certain colleagues for extended exchanges that helped me develop my ideas. Special thanks go fi rst to Myanna Lahsen, Clark Miller, Simon Shackley, Jim Fleming, and Peter Taylor. Spencer Weart, Sheila Jasanoff, Johan Schot, Timothy Lenoir, and Thomas Parke Hughes provided crucial professional opportunities as well as intellectual frame- works. Others I would like to thank for comments, criticisms, ideas, and other help that shaped this book include Amy Dahan Dalmedico, Manuel Castells, Donna Haraway, Pascal Griset, John Carson, Joel Howell, Alex Stern, Catherine Badgley, Frederick Suppe, John Leslie King, Richard Rood, Erik van der Vleuten, Arne Kaijser, Tineke Egyedi, Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Ben Santer, Susan Joy Hassol, Naomi Oreskes, Ted Parson, Geof Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, Steve Jackson, David Ribes, Chris Borgman, Chunglin Kwa, Dharma Akmon, Ted Hanss, Janet Ray Edwards, Dan Hirschman, Jeroen van der Sluijs, Michael Cohen, Rachelle Hollander, x Acknowledgments Arthur Petersen, and Judith Reppy. I thank Terry Root for everything she taught me, and especially for keeping Steve alive. The Stanford University Science, Technology and Society Program pro- vided the base from which I began this project. The University of Michigan School of Information, where I have worked since 1999, has been an incomparable intellectual home, with an unparalleled range, depth, and quality of scholarship as well as exceptional collegiality. My research assis- tants at Stanford and Michigan, including Yuri Takhteyev, Tom Allison, Amy Cooper, Zilia Estrada, and Archer Batcheller, provided invaluable help. At meteorological libraries around the world, numerous librarians and archivists helped me locate rare and obscure materials and references; among them, I particularly thank Diane Rabson. I interviewed numerous scientists during research for this book, some of them at great length and some of them several times. Though I rarely quote them directly, their generous gifts of history and explanation lie behind this book ’ s every page. My deepest thanks to Akio Arakawa, David Baumhefner, John Bergengren, William Bourke, Bruce Callendar, Robert Chervin, William Clark, Curt Covey, Richard Davis, Anthony Del Genio, Carter Emmart, John Firor, Jim Hack, Milt Halem, James Hansen, Bill Holland, Anthony Hollingsworth, Sir John Houghton, Barrie Hunt, Geoff Jenkins, Roy Jenne, Tom Karl, Akira Kasahara, Jeff Kiehl, Andrew Lacis, Cecil E. “ Chuck ” Leith, Richard Lindzen, Jerry Mahlman, Syukuro Manabe, Bryant McAvaney, Linda Mearns, John Mitchell, Roger Newson, Abraham Oort, Graeme Pearman, David Pollard, Kamal Puri, Robert Quayle, David Rind, William Rossow, Peter Rowntree, Robert Sadourny, David Schimel, Gus Schumbera, Stephen Schneider, Joseph Smagorinsky, Starley Thompson, Kevin Trenberth, Joe Tribbia, Warren Washington, Richard Wetherald, Tom Wigley, and Austin Woods. The National Science Foundation Research supported research for this book under grants SBE-9310892, SBR-9710616, SES-0630263, and BCS-0827316. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics funded oral history interviews, research assistance, and the production of a website on the history of climate modeling. The School of Information at the University of Michigan provided generous research support. At the MIT Press, I espe- cially want to thank the incomparable Margy Avery, who eased the pro duction process and thought so creatively about this book, and the extraordinary manuscript editor, Paul Bethge. Extraordinary friends eased the path of this long journey. Susan Douglas and T. R. Durham never lost faith in the project, or in me (and we ate so Acknowledgments xi well). Joel Howell ’ s wisdom and advice in time of need mattered more than he can ever know. Keith Breckenridge, Catherine Burns, Nolizwi Mpandana Stofela, and Cyprian Stofela gave us their beloved and beautiful South Africa. Ruth Oldenziel, Sven van Kuijk, and Marijn de Roos made Amsterdam a second home for us. In a category all their own, spanning intellectual, personal, and musical companionship, are my bandmates from the unforgettable Tensations: Andreas Fickers, Alec Badenoch, Susanne Lommers, Judith Schueler, Donna Mehos, Frank Schipper, and Nil Disco. Other very special friends are Todd Jones, Kali Israel, Alison Cook Sather, Robin White, Susan Bodnar, Eric Griffi ths, Ilona Bray, C. S. Soong, Rick Zinman, Dori Schack, and Eli and Isaac Schack Zinman. And no words can express my gratitude to my family: Carl, Janet, Craig, and Michael; Teresa and Mary K; Jesse, Annie, Maddie, and Spencer; Don, Elaine, and Lauren. Finally, I thank my son Luka, and Maya, for reminding me so often of why I wanted to do this. This book is for Steve, but it is also for them, and for the world they will inherit. Introduction Unless you have been in a coma since 1988, you have certainly heard or read a story that goes something like this: Global warming is a myth. It ’ s all model predictions, nothing but simulations. Before you believe it, wait for real data. “ The climate-studies people always tend to overestimate their models, ” the physicist Freeman Dyson told an interviewer in April 2009. “ They forget they are only models. ” 1 In the countless political controver- sies over climate change, the debate often shakes out into a contest: models versus data. This supposed contest is at best an illusion, at worst a deliberate decep- tion — because without models, there are no data . I ’ m not talking about the difference between “ raw ” and “ cooked ” data. I mean this literally. Today, no collection of signals or observations — even from satellites, which can “ see ” the whole planet — becomes global in time and space without fi rst passing through a series of data models. Since both observing systems and data models evolve, global data also change. We have not one data image of the global climate, but many. The past, or rather what we can know about the past, changes. And it will keep right on changing. I call this reverberation of data images “ shimmering. ” Global data images have proliferated, yet they have also converged. They shimmer around a central line, a trend that tells us that Earth has already warmed by about 0.75 ° C (1.35° F) since 1900.