The Nielsen family has owned and run Kangerluarsorujuk since 1972. The farm sits on a plateau at one end of a fjord. The barns for the sheep and two small, sturdy houses for the Nielsens are built to withstand Greenland's winter cold. Sign Up For The NPR Daily Newsletter
Kanuk has spent his entire life on this sheep farm. He says the summers are longer now than when he was a child — lasting from May to October — and drought has become a problem.
The researchers did a comprehensive literature review for pre-1990 models; for post-1990 models, they followed the literature reviews of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They ended up choosing 17 models to closely analyze, dating from 1970 through 2007 — models old enough to be testable against decades of observational data.
To be clear, almost all the models chosen are no longer in use, having been superseded by more sophisticated models since. Some of the earlier ones, especially those from the 1970s and early ’80s, are fairly crude energy-in, energy-out models, with a single variable for forcing (CO2) and a crude measure of climate sensitivity (the amount temperature rises per additional ton of CO2). It wasn’t until the late ’80s that James Hansen and other scientists developed multivariable general-circulation models.
It turns out that even those crude early models were fairly accurate, which is remarkable given the sophistication of the science and the available computing power. None of the models the authors analyzed got it badly wrong.
Leaders of the coal industry knew as early as the mid-1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change. That’s according to a recently discovered 1966 copy of the magazine Mining Congress Journal, in which the head of a now defunct mining research company wrote that the combustion of fossil fuels was increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, causing global temperature increases. He continued, writing, “Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London.” The recently discovered article now provides evidence that both the coal and oil industries have known about catastrophic climate change for decades, yet worked to cover up the evidence in order to continue burning fossil fuels.