Winner: Manabe & Wetherald (1967)
With eight nominations, a seminal paper by Syukuro Manabe and Richard. T. Wetherald published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences in 1967 tops the Carbon Brief poll as the IPCC scientists' top choice for the most influential climate change paper of all time.
Entitled, "Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity", the work was the first to represent the fundamental elements of the Earth's climate in a computer model, and to explore what doubling carbon dioxide (CO2) would do to global temperature.
Manabe & Wetherald (1967), Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences
The Manabe & Wetherald paper is considered by many as a pioneering effort in the field of climate modelling, one that effectively opened the door to projecting future climate change. And the value of climate sensitivity is something climate scientists are
still grappling with today.
Prof Piers Forster, a physical climate scientist at Leeds University and lead author of the chapter on clouds and aerosols in working group one of the last IPCC report, tells Carbon Brief:
"This was really the first physically sound climate model allowing accurate predictions of climate change."
The paper's findings have stood the test of time amazingly well, Forster says.
"Its results are still valid today. Often when I've think I've done a new bit of work, I found that it had already been included in this paper."
Prof Steve Sherwood, expert in atmospheric climate dynamics at the University of New South Wales and another lead author on the clouds and aerosols chapter, says it's a tough choice, but Manabe & Wetherald (1967) gets his vote, too. Sherwood tells Carbon Brief:
"[The paper was] the first proper computation of global warming and stratospheric cooling from enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations, including atmospheric emission and water-vapour feedback."
Prof Danny Harvey, professor of climate modelling at the University of Toronto and lead author on the buildings chapter in the IPCC's working group three report on mitigation, emphasises the Manabe & Wetherald paper's impact on future generations of scientists. He says:
"[The paper was] the first to assess the magnitude of the water vapour feedback, and was frequently cited for a good 20 years after it was published."
Carbon Brief will be publishing an interview with Syukuro Manabe, alongside a special summary by
Prof John Mitchell, the Met Office Hadley Centre's chief scientist from 2002 to 2008 and director of climate science from 2008 to 2010, on why the paper still holds such significance today.