of the earth but also to a much greater and continually growing flow of data. Initially this fueled work on a subject that gained some attention and government funding—“advertant” (that is, intentional) weather modification, aimed at such things as moderating storms and increasing rain in dry parts of the world. Already in 1961 President John F. Kennedy, addressing the United Nations, was calling for “cooperative efforts between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control.” The topic of weather modification passed from the scene, but the contribution of satellites to vastly improved understanding of weather continued to grow.
The second advance was the invention of, and extraordinary development in, computing power, which in turn made possible the new discipline of climate modeling. The advent of the computer, in historical terms, owes much to a chance meeting on a railroad platform near the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland during World War II. A young mathematician caught sight of a world-famous figure—at least world famous in the worlds of science and mathematics. His name was John von Neumann. “With considerable temerity” the mathematician, Herman Goldfine, started a conversation. To Goldfine’s surprise, von Neumann, despite his towering reputation, was quite friendly. But when Goldfine told von Neumann that he was helping develop “an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per second,” the conversation abruptly changed “from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination for the doctor’s degree in mathematics.”25
John von Neumann—born János Neumann in Budapest—had emigrated to the United States in 1930 to become, along with Albert Einstein, one of the first faculty members at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Von Neumann would prove to be one of the most extraordinary and creative figures of the twentieth century, not only one of the century’s greatest mathematicians but also an outstanding physicist and, almost as a sideline, one of the most influential figures in modern economics (he invented game theory and is said to have “changed the very way economic analysis is done”). Not only that, he is often described as the “father of the computer” as well as the inventor of nuclear deterrence. (In 1956, near the end of his life, gathered around his bed in Walter Reed Hospital were the secretary of defense and his deputies, the secretaries of the army, navy, and air force, and all the joint chiefs of staff, all there for his “last words of advice and wisdom.”) He also fathered the modern mathematical analysis of climate modeling that became the basic tool for diagnosing global warming. He accomplished all this before he died in 1957, at the age of fifty-three.26
Von Neumann had an extraordinary ability to do complex calculations in his head at lightning speed. Once, as a six-year-old, he saw his mother staring off into space, daydreaming , and he asked her, “What are you calculating?” As an adult he let his subconscious work on mathematical problems in his sleep and woke up at 3:00 a.m. with the answer. At the same time, he had the ability to look at things in a wholly new manner. The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam emphasized how much analogies figured in von Neumann’s thought processes. One of his closest friends, Ulam would exchange both mathematical insights and intricate Yiddish jokes with him. Ulam would tease von Neumann for being too practical, for trying to apply mathematics to all sorts of problems. Once he told von Neumann, “When it comes to the application of mathematics to dentistry, maybe you’ll stop.”
The economist Paul Samuelson said von Neumann had “the fastest mind” he had ever encountered. The head of Britain’s National Physical Laboratory called him “the cleverest man in the world.” A peer summed up what many who worked with him thought: “Unquestionably the nearest thing to a genius I have ever encountered.”27
That chance meeting on the Aberdeen railroad platform in August 1944 would propel von Neumann to become the “father of computing.” Until then, computers were not machines but a job classification: “computers” were people who did the tiresome but essential calculations needed for surveying or for calculating the tides or the movements of heavenly bodies. But von Neumann had been questing after something like a mechanical computer in order to handle the immense computational challenge he and his colleagues had faced while working on the atomic bomb during World War II. At the secret Los Alamos, as they struggled to figure out how to transform the theoretical concept of a chain reaction into a fearsome