A 50-Year-Old Global Warming Forecast That Still Holds Up
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of my mentor, climatologist Mikhail Budyko (1920–2001). Fifty years ago, when the science of climate change prediction was in its infancy, this scientist from the Soviet Union made a series of climate predictions that have proven to be surprisingly on target in the years since.
These predictions were not as well known as some of his other work. The reason for this had to do, as Budyko recalled in a 1990 interview, with most of his colleagues at the time rejecting the idea of unavoidable, long-term global warming as something absolutely impossible. It took almost 20 years for the scientific establishment to accept this paradigm.