Early climate models got global warming right – but now US funding cuts threaten the future of climate science data

Since the 1960s, scientists have been developing and honing models to understand how the earth’s climate is changing. These models help predict the phenomena that accompany that change, such as stronger storms, rising sea levels and warming temperatures.

One such pioneer of early climate modelling is Syukuro Manabe, who won the Nobel prize in physics in 2021 for his work laying the foundation for our current understanding of how carbon dioxide affects global temperatures. That same year, a seminal paper he co-published in 1967 was voted the most influential climate science paper of all time.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast,  we speak to Nadir Jeevanjee, a researcher at the same lab in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration where Manabe once worked. He looks back at the history of these early climate models, and how many of their major predictions have stood the test of time.

“ On one hand, we’ve gone way beyond Manabe in the decades since,” says Jeevanjee. “And on the other hand, some of those insights were so deep that we keep coming back to them to deepening our understanding.”

And yet, as climate negotiators gather in the Brazilian city of Belem on the edge of the Amazon for the Cop30 climate summit to hammer out new pledges on reducing carbon emissions and how to pay for climate adaptation, the data sources that climate scientists around the world rely on to monitor and model the climate are under threat from funding cuts by the Trump administration.

“We all do this work because we believe in its importance,” says Jevanjee. “And so the idea that the work isn’t necessarily valued by the present government, or that we wouldn’t be able to do it, or that somehow our lab and the models that it produces and all the science that comes out of it will be curtailed or shut, is alarming.”

Listen to the interview with Nadir Jeevanjee on The Conversation Weekly podcast, and read an article he wrote about five forecasts that early climate models by Suki Manabe and his colleagues got right.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood, Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from CNN.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.