ABSTRACT
The atmosphere is a turbulent fluid whose temperature, humidity and wind vary from submillimetric eddies visible in cigarette smoke to huge planetary sized weather systems. Arrhenius's theory signalled the beginning of modern attempts to prove the anthropogenic provenance of a warming that only became strongly apparent in the 1980's. The weather – macroweather – climate trichotomy is helpful for understanding anthropogenic warming: whereas in pre-industrial times, slowly acting natural processes eventually – at scales of a century or more – begin to dominate the macroweather processes. The undisputed father of General Circulation Models (GCM's) is Lewis F. Richardson. He was the first to write down the modern complete set of nonlinear, partial differential equations for the evolution of the atmosphere, publishing – at his own expense – the seminal "Weather prediction by numerical process".
