About 1980ish, some old ideas like the greenhouse effect were brought out of mothballs and re-examined with new tools and techniques; simultaneously several researchers and theoreticians released their notes, published, or otherwise got together and there was a surprising consilience and not a small amount of mixing with old school hippy ecologism
on some of the topics that became the roots of Climate Change science (
before it was called Global Warming); innovations in mathematics were also applied to climate thought; supercomputers (though «disappointing»
on weather forecasting) allowed demonstration of plausibility of runaway climate effects, comparison of
scales of effects, and the possibility of climate models combined with a good understanding of the
limits of predictive power of weather models.