![]() ![]() ![]() Its scope expanded from establishing historical changes to developing modern datasets that could be used to detect whether human influence could already be seen in the patterns of changing climateĬRU turns 50 this year and its mission is as clear as ever – to improve understanding of how and why our climate changes, using machine learning, statistical and physics-based models to make better predictions of future warming. But the realisation – partly due to CRU’s findings at the end of that decade – that human-caused climate change was becoming a global concern led instead to an expansion of the unit. When it was founded, the assumption was that CRU might exist for only a decade before the research was wound down or taken up elsewhere. We now know that very well, not least through CRU’s research to show how much and how fast the planet has warmed. It is now reliably established that the burning of fossil fuel has increased atmospheric CO 2 levels… and it has been claimed that the world-wide warming trend observed through to the 1940s was brought about by the ‘greenhouse effect’ of the increased CO 2."Īnd yet, 50 years ago, we did not know how much impact the burning of fossil fuels would have on our planet. In his proposal to establish CRU, Prof Lamb wrote: "Among the many environmental changes brought about by man, few are as far reaching as those that affect climate. Understanding humanity's impact on our climate Footage sourced from the unique Anglia TV collections held at the East Anglian Film Archive ( EAFA) with kind permission of ITV. Prof Hubert Lamb, the founder of CRU, talks about the impact of climate change in this extract from the 1978 ITV Anglia documentary Changing Climate. Soon after this, in 1972, Prof Hubert Lamb founded the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at UEA, with the aim of establishing climate change records “over as much of the world as possible, as far back in time as was feasible.” Three years later, the Irish physicist John Tyndall built on this discovery by identifying the long-wave infrared rays responsible for this heating – and first demonstrated the greenhouse effect.īut it wasn’t until the 1960s, when the first climate models that could demonstrate how the greenhouse effect operated in detail were created, that climatic research began to grow into something like the field we might recognise today. In 1856 the American scientist Eunice Newton Foot discovered that carbon dioxide and water vapour absorbed solar radiation – and suggested that variations in these elements could cause changes in our climate. ![]() While climate science might appear a relatively young field, we have had at least a basic understanding of the physics of climate change for 150 years. ![]()
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