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.