THIS IS THE TEXT OF AN ESSAY IN THE WEB SITE “THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING” BY SPENCER

WEART, HTTP://WWW.AIP.ORG/HISTORY/CLIMATE. MAY 2023. HYPERLINKS WITHIN THAT SITE ARE NOT
INCLUDED IN THIS FILE. FOR AN OVERVIEW SEE THE BOOK OF THE SAME TITLE (HARVARD UNIV. PRESS,
2003). COPYRIGHT © 2003-2023 SPENCER WEART & AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS.

History in Hypertext (Methodology & Sources)

For those interested in the scholarly method used on this site, below are sections on:
Writing a Hyperlinked History, Disadvantages Compared with Conventional Print,
Source Materials, Missing Pieces and Errors, and How You Can Help with comments or
corrections, Printing or Referencing this Work, Author/credits. An Appendix gives some
technical details on Web site construction.

Writing a hyperlinked history:

Traditional histories of science focused on “scientific revolutions,” singular advances that

overthrew old ideas and climaxed in a grand and satisfying synthesis. Climate change research is
science of another type. Earth’s climate (like so much of importance) is conditioned by many
different kinds of factors, all strong enough to count, all interacting with one another in
fantastically complex ways. Over the decades scientists improved their understanding of how
each factor acts and interacts, meanwhile adding new factors. No revolution could turn that type
of understanding on its head, nor do scientists expect any terminus in the foreseeable future. We
have no closed story but a ceaselessly developing set of partial understandings

Our knowledge of how this complex type of science works is primitive. Not only the public, but
even most scientists, only see particular strings of incidents. Few have mentally organized an
overall picture. We need a way to display the many lines of research and how they intertwined.
Along with this we need to follow the general trend of scientific opinion. At each point dozens of
recent results influence this opinion, and it influences in turn the direction of future research.
Scientific opinion also interacts with public concerns, and public concerns interact with funding,
and funding takes us back to the start by influencing which lines of research scientists can
pursue.

The attempt to grasp all this has led me to a separate essay with reflections on the scientific
process, which I offer for the attention of anyone interested in how scientists come to understand
the world better.

The World-Wide Web gives us a new way to display complex information of this nature. Not
only here but in various contemporary media, creators increasingly call upon their audience to
navigate freely according to their own initiative. That’s an expression of the complexity and
choices that pervade many areas of contemporary experience. As the creators of an end-of-the-
century exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art put it, “viewers are invited to explore the
exhibitions in any order, constructing from them their own, personal narratives... The pathways
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 2

are laid out as an exploration... not as finished maps, but as possible ways of proceeding.”1 Of
course novelists have long struggled with issues of simultaneity and multiple viewpoints.2 Even
the most linear sort of traditional history book, say a biography, will have a chapter on one aspect
of its subject followed by a chapter on another aspect (say, scientific discoveries here, family life
there). It is up to the reader to put it all together. That is the way our brains work: not laying
down a single linear track but building a network of associated images and ideas. A Web site can
mirror this cognitive process. The author can put each of the relevant stories on one Web page or
another, linked to as many other story pages as needed. The only innovation is that the author, for
better or worse, does not constrain the reader’s choice in the order of exploring the stories and
their connections.

From several hundred comments received subsequently in response to a survey form that was
included on some pages until 2014, I can conclude that in dealing with the hyperlinks, readers
divide into three roughly equal groups. One group finds them puzzling and distracting, and after
a few attempts reverts to the traditional mode of reading through the essays one by one. A second
group is delighted by the hyperlinks and praises them highly. A third group takes a mixed
approach, reading through an essay and then exploring some of the hyperlinks.

Making such an extensive cross-linked work involved some time-consuming technical software
issues, discussed below.

But this is harder to read than print! Yes, we find it hard to read a long essay off a computer
screen with current technology. The resolution is 72 dots-per-inch (so the letters are fuzzy), and
the contrast is 70% (the “white” background is actually gray), which are far worse than a book’s
300-plus dpi and 95%-plus contrast. When I started this work in the early 1990s, I thought laptop
e-books with high resolution and high screen contrast would be common by now. Until the
technology catches up, some readers will prefer to print out the essays using the page of PDF
files. (Note on Web design: constraining the text to a fairly narrow newspaper-style column is
important for readability on newer 1024-pixel-wide screens, since the eye has trouble finding its
position in scanning back and forth across long lines. The newspaper-style column turned out to
be readable on the later platforms, notably phones.) Even so, I hope that the explicit display of
interactions will promote a way of comprehending history that would not be possible if all the

1
An early example was an experimental “book” by B.S. Johnson, The Unfortunates
(1964, reprinted Picador, 1999, reprinted New Directions, 2008), a boxed set of unbound
chapters of memories and reveries; the first and last chapters were designated but the rest could
be read in any order. A recent example is Alan Ayckbourne’s double play “House” and “Garden”
(Royal National Theatre, London, 2000), staged simultaneously in two theaters with actors going
back and forth, and audiences viewing one or the other play each night. The “all-over” painting
style of Jackson Pollack might be considered a visual precursor. The parallel-gallery museum
style is catching on, e.g., in London’s new Tate Modern. Quote: MoMA vol. 2, no. 8 (Oct. 1999),
p. 5.
2
e.g., Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Agent” (1907)..
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 3

information were beaten into a single, linear story. After all, this is the way we learn the history
of any large subject: we read a bit here and a bit there, and put it together in our heads.

What else do we lose by not publishing conventionally?

A scholarly publisher will submit a scholarly work for “peer review,” and most reviewers take
the task seriously. They can point out both specific and general errors, and along with the press’s
editor can give advice on organization and tone. I partly substituted for this by e-mailing a couple
of dozen scientists and historians, asking them to review specific essays (which I attached), and
as much else of the site as they wanted to. I also wrote and published peer-reviewed articles, and
gave talks on aspects of the subject at History of Science Society meetings and elsewhere. This
produced quite a few comments on particular details, which were useful. However, very few
people gave advice outside their immediate area of interest, some essays were not reviewed by
anyone, and nobody commented on the overall structure in terms of balance among the topics,
use of hypertext, and analysis. Scientists and other scholars evidently won’t work as hard in
response to an author’s request as they will for a publisher (and why should they?).

On the plus side, after you publish a work on the Web, some people will email you to point out
problems, which you can quickly correct online. This has helped me revise many passages that
were potentially misleading or outright in error. I am also receiving a few comments per week
through a feedback form. This rarely produces information beyond the specific questions the
form asks, but it gives me a good idea of who are my most committed readers and what they
need. Also, I published a short book simultaneously, and this inspired reviews and emails that
pointed out other difficulties that I could correct on the Web site and in the second edition of the
book.

The peer review has an additional benefit in endorsing the scholarly validity of a work. One
could request reviews for a Web site. Anyone who agreed to do this, however, would find it hard
to evaluate a sprawling site that different people are supposed to read in different ways. Most of
the reviews of the associated book have mentioned the Website, but only as a good source of
additional information. Hardly anyone has “reviewed” the Web site’s content or structure beyond
a sentence or two.1 This is not a crucial problem for me, since I have a well-established
reputation, plus the endorsement from the publication and favorable reception of the associated
peer-reviewed book. But if I were a younger scholar, especially one seeking tenure in academia, I
would have had to focus on conventional peer-reviewed publications. Aside from obstacles due
to conservatism or outright ignorance of the Web, we cannot expect the people who award jobs
and tenure in universities to evaluate work in a distant specialty by themselves. (As for the
notorious problem that you can’t make any money by putting stuff on the Web, writing rarely
pays for scholars anyway, except insofar as it helps them win an academic position.) It is also
more difficult at present to get professional recognition simply as useful material. Traditional
1
The only (but brief) exceptions are Michael DuVernois in Physics and Society 33(3):16
(July 2004), the newsletter of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics and Society,
and Chris Ware in Isis 97(4): 804-806 (2006).
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 4

scholars have cited my short summary book in their footnotes but have hesitated to cite a
Website. There is some justification, since a sentence cited from one of my Web essays may have
changed by the time somebody looks at it in a later year.

A publisher should also provide a copy-editor, who will suggest changes in almost every
paragraph—pointing out places where the author has been obscure, as well as grammatical
solecisms and simple spelling and punctuation errors. I am a pretty good writer and copy-editor,
and the copy-editing was not seriously missed. Still, for the second (2004) version I took the time
to apply a spell-checker, which caught a small number of errors, and the WordPerfect
“Grammatik” grammar- and style-checker, which tediously pointed out quite a few minor
improvements and reminded me I use the passive voice too much. Yet even the best author and
software will miss things that a good copy-editor can point out. Nowadays scholarly presses are
becoming less able to pay for decent copy-editing, and even authors of works in print may be
well advised to hire a freelance copy-editor.

On the plus side, year after year this Website has been getting about 1000 visitors a day, well
beyond the readership of the book (although that is selling well enough) in numbers and variety.
Users responding to my survey include students, concerned citizens, and a surprising number of
academic, corporate and government professionals involved with climate or climate impacts.

Source materials:

The next question is, what to include? The basic problem of any historian is selection of material
(even an apparently self-contained topic like a biography can come to seem limitless). In print we
are limited by the economics of how many pages a book can reasonably contain. For a Web site,
our limit should be a realistic appraisal of how much time a normal reader will really want to
spend on a given topic.

The scientific literature. Historians may claim that their ideal is to treat the past on its own
terms, but we cannot give equal space to each year of each research effort. Among the thousands
of scientific papers scattered like seeds in the past, we are naturally most interested in those that
have borne fruit. Uncertainties impede such a selective approach for a topic that is still unfolding.
We don’t know exactly which geophysical forces are most important for climate change, nor
which scientific approaches point toward the best explanations. Some controversies have
remained unresolved for decades. Matters now considered minor (as carbon dioxide once was)
may eventually loom large, and vice-versa.

I have therefore been liberal in identifying the papers to include here (see the bibliography). One
source for references was contemporaneous reviews.1 Another source was the scattering of

1
For example, Bolin (1952); Bolin (1972); Carson (1999); Charlock et al. (1993) (actual
closing date ca. 1986); Hobbs et al. (1974); Jones and Henderson-Sellers (1990); Landsberg
(1958); Landsberg (1970); Meehl (1990); Rossby (1959); Shapley (1953), and reports by the
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 5

historical writings, popularizations, and historically-aware textbooks that have addressed the
question, mostly by scientists. Works by professional historians have been few (although the
number is rising) and focus on narrow topics; works that purport to be comprehensive often give
undue emphasis to the events or topics that the authors are most familiar with.1 I found many
other significant references by keeping abreast of the current literature on climate change, relying
perhaps too much on scientific articles and news reviews in the leading journals Nature and
Science. Articles here often refer to older papers that the authors consider foundational for their
subject: among many references to papers published recently, one often finds a few references to
papers ten years old or more. My next step was to review the papers identified by all these
methods. These papers often gave in turn references that reached back another decade, and so
forth.

Thus I built my text largely around the papers that respected scientists, five or ten or twenty years
later, remembered as important. Unfortunately the papers themselves did not always in fact say
what others remembered they had said. The historian must make some assessment of the contents
of each paper, and I have looked at nearly every item that I cite (sometimes only the abstract was
accessible). However, the historian should hesitate before saying that a piece of work was less or
more important than scientists later thought, for the impression a paper made at the time can be
as significant as its retrospective technical content. On the other hand, scientists sometimes
properly cite a paper not for its main thrust but for some idea or item of data that the authors
themselves didn’t emphasize at the time—something they tossed in on the side, but which later
turned out to be crucial.

My method of looking only at older references passes up more than nine papers in ten,
overlooking many thousands of studies that were useful enough for scientists to cite a few years
later. Some of these were important but missed by my procedure. Only late in my work did I get
to some bibliographies compiled by scientists, and a glance at them shows the extent of the
problem. Of 29 pre-1988 papers on “stable isotopes in polar ice” listed in a 1995 historically-
oriented bibliography, I had seen only five; of 20 recommended pre-1988 historical references on
climate modeling in a 1997 text, I had seen only seven.2 On the other hand, references that said

National Academy of Sciences, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, etc. Further
reviews on particular topics are referenced in the various essays.
1
Early works include Ausubel (1983); Broecker (1995b); Christianson (1999); Edwards
(2000b); Fleagle (1992a); Fleming (1998); Handel and Risbey (1992); Hart and Victor (1993);
Imbrie and Imbrie (1986); Jones and Henderson-Sellers (1990); Kellogg (1987); Lamb (1977);
McGuffie and Henderson-Sellers (1997); Miller and Edwards (2001); Nebeker (1995);
O’Riordan and Jäger (1996); Pearson (1978), ch. 2; Randall (2000); Rodhe and Charlson (1998);
Schneider and Londer (1984); Smagorinsky (1983); Smagorinsky (1991); Stevens (1999).
Further articles and books on particular topics are referenced in the various essays, and see also
the online links pageat www.aip.org/history/climate/links.htm#hist.
2
Broecker (1995b); McGuffie and Henderson-Sellers (1997); my coverage was no better
for the hundred or so pre-1988 references in IPCC (2001).
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 6

they pointed to especially important work were almost always citing papers I had already seen. If
not, I had usually seen a paper that represented much the same body of research, but that had
been published a bit earlier or later. For example, of the nine papers by a leading modeler that I
later found had been most cited in other publications, I had already seen eight, and the ninth was
recent.1 From such “catch-and-release” samplings, I estimate that I have caught well over nine-
tenths of the hundred or so most important studies, but not quite all.

The method of relying on citations of older articles to suggest those that scientists found
especially important does not work well for papers published more than a decade before the
citing publication (I started in the 1990s and continue into the 2020s), so I have fallen back
especially on the articles selected by the editors and science reporters of the leading journals
Nature and Science. I have also increasingly relied on news articles and blog posts by dedicated
followers of climate science (both scientists and journalists) to point me to recent scientific
articles of particular significance. Of course I read the articles and use my own judgment as to
whether their findings merit inclusion on this website. Since the appearance of Google Scholar
(http://scholar.google.com) I have found it useful for identifying papers on particular topics and
finding which ones are most frequently cited by other scientists; these are often the most
important papers. Someone who has a lot of time and a university account for the Web of
Knowledge http://www.isiknowledge.com could do still better through detailed investigation of
the citation data there.

Now what about those holes—the papers that only turned up late in my study, representing
publications I could easily have missed entirely? These mostly turned out to be findings that
exerted an influence in concert with others. Different scientists will recall different papers as the
ones that first intrigued them or finally convinced them. Many of the almost-missed papers were
not cited for anything surprising, but for some ancillary technical point, such as a particularly
good set of data, or a correction or embellishment to an ongoing theoretical argument. As this
study shows abundantly, in geophysics what drives a change of scientific opinion is often the
cumulative pressure of several varieties of evidence and thinking. In short, I think the history I
have written accurately represents the scientific process, but am not everywhere reliable in
assessing the exact influence of specific pieces of work. So let me offer an—

Apologia. Even for quite important bodies of research, I cite papers chiefly to serve as examples,
sometimes almost random samples, of the work of a larger community. Each stands in for other
papers that published related data, calculations or techniques. Those other papers often involved
different principal authors or coauthors, people I could perhaps have cited in addition to, or
instead of, those named in the bibliography. And that’s not even to mention the hundreds of
collaborators and students concealed in “et al.” Further, I have deliberately gone into some detail
on a few particular lines of research while entirely overlooking others that helped at least as
much to move knowledge forward. To include it all would have taken more time on my part, and
would demand more time from readers, than anyone could well give. My apologies to you,
1
Bibliography compiled by S. Manabe of his work with citation numbers, papers with
over 200 citations..
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 7

scientists, I wish I could tell all your splendid accomplishments.

A related problem is that this narrative, by concentrating on the best work, gives a distorted view
of how science is done. I have made a picture by connecting the dots among roughly a thousand
of the most important scientific papers in climate science. Each of those papers stands for another
ten or so of nearly the same importance. And for each of those ten thousand, the community of
scientists had to look through perhaps ten more that turned out to be less significant—papers that
gave some minor corroboration, or that had errors either obvious or misleading, or that were just
not relevant. Even while wishing to show the history in its full complexity, I have pulled the
main developments above this distracting noise. The picture is clearer than working scientists
could ever see at the time.

Scientists may see little of interest in a paper that later turned out to be significant, or they may
just miss reading it among the many publications in many fields. My narrative is distorted most
of all where it seems to show that something was widely “known” once it was published. In fact,
time and again I came across ideas and findings that were introduced in plausible publications,
but that most scientists scarcely noticed through the next decade or so. When readers of these
essays reach a given point in the story, they understand the “state of knowledge” at that point
better than any scientist of the time did, for the knowledge was dispersed among many
individuals.

Popular writings. Popular and semi-popular books and news articles by climate scientists, and
still more by journalists who interviewed them, tell another part of the story. Here we see
particular features of scientific development penetrating the public consciousness, and the public
influencing science in turn through its enthusiasms and its influence on sources of funding. My
most useful guides were the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature and the New York Times
Index. These are restricted to a U.S. view, but public views and government funding in the U.S.
were representative, when they were not well in the lead, of world opinion during most of the
period covered here. I have not done so well in covering European public opinion and politics in
the post-1988 period, when the Europeans moved ahead of the U.S. in important respects. I
simply ran out of time and energy to investigate that huge subject. In addition, I have relied on
science journalists such as Walter Sullivan and later Andrew Revkin of the NY Times, Richard
Kerr of Science magazine, the editors of Science and Nature, and for more recent developments
also the editors and writers of New Scientist (especially Fred Pearce), Eos, Discover, etc., whose
close contact with scientists pointed them to problems of intense interest at a given time. These
problems have received special (and possibly disproportionate) emphasis in my narrative, and
here too, the recent emphasis has been perhaps too narrowly Anglo-American.

Unpublished documents and recollections. Writing history from published papers is like flying
over a clouded terrain where isolated peaks rise above the clouds. You get a general idea of the
range but you can be seriously deceived about the relationship between individual peaks. Did
scientist A write a paper, which scientist B then read before writing a new paper? Perhaps A and
B had discussed the matter at a conference years earlier. Or perhaps B had spoken with C, who
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 8

had corresponded with A, while an earlier obscure report by D offered a clue... etc. Instead of a
uniform forward march of logic, we see a scurrying about of many half-formed ideas. The real
history surely has many more cross-links than I could see. For example, except for a page in the
autobiographical reminiscences of James Lovelock, I would not have known that meteorologists’
concern about industrial haze stimulated his work on a gas that turned out to be significant.

To get a better view, I made forays into some archives, where old letters and the like tell much
about the human processes of funding, carrying out research, and publication. Of course I could
only survey a tiny fraction of the materials that exist in scientists’ files. And in many of the files I
did see, a lot of paper had been thrown away. I also conducted some oral history interviews. The
weaknesses of human memory are notorious, yet it is rightly standard practice for historians to
tape-record the recollections of the principal surviving figures from the events they are studying.
Once you take into account the well-known hazards, such recollections may give you the only
hint of important matters for which no documentary record is known—personal viewpoints,
twists and turns of scientific thinking, human interactions. (Of course the same problems of
memory, particularly the human tendency to assign credit to oneself and one’s colleagues, infect
even the most austere published papers.) The archives and interviews have had some influence
on my general conclusions, and perhaps more valuable, they have opened some holes in the
clouds. In a few of the side essays I explore the rugged terrain between the peaks, to serve as
examples and warnings of what is missing from the rest.

Updates. Since 2001 I have updated the site annually, mainly to keep current with new research
findings and the public and policy response. Mostly I have been able simply to add sentences or
paragraphs plus references. But sometimes I have had to change passages where I made
statements that reflected a tentative scientific consensus which later research altered or refuted.
For example, in 2018 I changed a statement about the attribution of a hurricane’s intensity from
“Such a question can never be answered for a single event,” to “Scientists were not yet able to
answer that kind of question for a single event,” taking into account how understanding of
tropical cyclones was advancing. For all this I have depended more than I would have liked on
the small minority of research papers that were highlighted by the leading science journals and
science journalists. Later historians will probably find that some research which was hardly
noticed at first later proved important. Meanwhile a rapidly growing historical literature on
climate science and its politics has allowed me to fill in a number of gaps in my accounts of
earlier events and to offer broader interpretations.

This website first went online in 2001. By 2007 the study of the impacts of global warming was
becoming a central field, both scientifically and for public concerns, and I wrote a new essay on
that subject. Another field that became increasingly crucial was paleoclimatology (in the 2021
IPCC report, observations of ancient climate change were given at least as much weight as
computer climate models for projecting future changes). If I were starting over I would devote a
separate essay to the history of modern paleoclimatology, but at this point the field’s findings are
too interwoven in several of the essays to disentangle; I leave it to future scholars to write a
coherent history of paleoclimatology. Other important omissions are the history of political
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 9

engagement outside the United States, and the economics and technologies of mitigation and
adaptation.

Missing pieces and errors — how you can help:

This is a work in progress in serious need of additions and corrections. As mentioned in the
discussion of source materials, I have had to rely on the fallible memory of scientists and on my
own quick reading of scientific papers in fields where I am no expert. Sometimes when I went
back to a paper after learning more, I found that I had misjudged it—and I have not been able to
go back to all the papers.

Special problems arise when you try to write a history of recent events. I have signaled this by
separating out sections for events after 1988. These sections necessarily lack a good historical
perspective, can be criticized for bias under the pressures of contemporary politics, and inevitably
miss pieces of the story that will turn out to be significant. Regrettably, I don’t doubt that these
essays also contain outright errors (readers have kindly helped me to correct a few).

In a more general sense, these pages offer only a narrow view of science. The people have mostly
been stripped out. The statistician angrily defending an idiosyncratic climate theory against all
comers, the voluble oceanographer in an office cluttered with mementoes from the seven seas,
the computer modeler who is nowhere happier than burrowing into equations—it was
personalities like these who pushed the science ahead. You will read only a little about them
here. To select what I would cover, I relied on my view of science as an ecosystem of ideas. It is
a particular kind of system (not at all like, say, war or politics), in which personalities can
influence the pace and direction of change, but not the final scientific results.1

You can contribute ideas for revisions and corrections. These essays are incomplete, some
of the explanations are obscure, and surely a few things are just plain wrong: where so many
different scientific fields and events are covered, I have not been able to check everything for
complete accuracy. Please do complain about erroneous, obscure or inconsistent interpretations,
and draw my attention to missing or incorrect information, typos and other mistakes. Email your
suggestions to [email protected].

Printing and referencing this work:

You are welcome to download and print out for your personal or classroom use PDF files of
these essays. If you cannot do this, contact the Center for History of Physics, American Institute
of Physics email: [email protected], mail: One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740 USA, and
they will mail you a copy at cost. A “record copy” is stored in the archives of the Center’s Niels
Bohr Library; this printed version represents the text mounted on the World Wide Web as of
August 2003. The PDFs match revised versions mounted at intervals since then, but may not
incorporate small recent changes in some pages.

1
Weart (1997).
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 10

You may copy, reprint, quote or cite short sections of this work under “fair use” but reproduction
(in print or on the Web) of large parts is prohibited: everything is copyright © 2003-2016
Spencer Weart and the American Institute of Physics. You are welcome to give a URL link to
any point in the site. If you wish to give a reference to a particular passage in this work, I suggest
you give the author and essay title, overall title, Web site URL and date, for example:

Spencer Weart, “The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect,” in Weart, The Discovery of
Global Warming, http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm, February 2012.

Note that entire passages, including footnotes, can change from one version to the next, so be
sure to include the date given at the top of the Web or PDF page.

Author/Credits: This text is by Spencer Weart, supported by the American Institute of

Physics (Center for History of Physics). I developed the GCM essay from an essay by Paul
Edwards, and the solar essay from one by Theodore S. Feldman. My work was also supported by
grants from the National Science Foundation’s Program in Science & Technology Studies and
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For research assistance I thank Drew Arrowwood, Stephen
Norton, and Niem Dang. I am particularly grateful for the indispensable help provided by the
scientists who generously gave me interviews, extensive comments, or access to documents,
especially A. Arakawa, W. Broecker, K. Bryan, R.A. Bryson, J. Eddy, J. Fleagle, P. Foukal, J.
Hansen, C.D. Keeling, S. Manabe, K. Masuda, J. Smagorinsky and R.M. White. All material on
this site copyright © 2003-2005 Spencer Weart and the American Institute of Physics.

Related:
Reflections on the Scientific Process

Appendix: Technical Details

I wrote this work in WordPerfect 6 and 9, and kept the bibliography in EndNote 4 software.
Where I decided to put a cross-link, I inserted it in the text enclosed in special character
combinations never used elsewhere and a unique number, e.g. <:internat ^f0123:> indicated link
number 0123 from the essay that would become internat.htm. The corresponding “to” link was
similarly put in that essay. The program “Search and Replace” (Funduc software) was useful in
making sure I used each number once and only once. Altogether the site displays more than 700
cross-links between its essays. The number of hyperlinks, including both directions for the cross-
links, links to endnotes and from endnotes to bibliography, a few dozen external links, etc., totals
more than 7000.

When ready to convert for the Web, I devised an EndNote style that would insert (“expand”)
references in the text. It included the reference identification number and other material enclosed
in special character combinations (e.g., [999<$>Author (year)<#>Label] ). I incorporated all
essays into a master document so that the bibliography could be compiled. I then cut that out and
 Weart DGW 5/23 Methods - 11

put it in a separate document.

I spent a few weeks devising WordPerfect macros to carry out a variety of tasks, starting with
various cleanups of messy fonts etc. in the text. The macros used simple Search, Cut, Paste, and
Replace operations, without any elaborate logical structure (I used ON NOT FOUND GOTO
along with FOR-NEXT loops to avoid possible endless looping). For each separate essay, a
WordPerfect macro located the special characters delineating notes, and put the material into
endnotes. I then used the WordPerfect “Save as” facility to save the text as HTML. From that
point on I worked in the HTML code, bringing it into WordPerfect as ASCII and running macros
to rework the code. During the writing I had inserted a special character (viz., ^) to indicate
places where I would need to do hand-coding of HTML, and I now took care of those places.

A macro gave each essay appropriate header material and enclosed the text in an HTML table.
Macros put each paragraph in a separate row in a cell, then located and extracted cross-links and
placed them in an adjacent cell. The link numbers needed to be extracted again and placed in
anchors at the start of each paragraph. Other macros located the endnote citations by their special
character combinations, then created links to the endnotes themselves, and linked the references
in the endnotes to anchors in the bibliography. Another macro placed these anchors in the
bibliography, using the reference numbers. In general, all code that looked similar in all of the
essays was put there by macros. For final polishing such as insertion of illustrations, I used
DreamWeaver MX software.

None of this is recommended to anyone except those familiar with, and not unduly frustrated by,
writing and debugging simple code. (I’ve been writing code since I did my doctoral thesis on
solar physics in the days of punched cards and batch processing.) I trust that eventually someone
will write general purpose software for this sort of work. In principle one could write an entire
work like this from scratch using a program like DreamWeaver. In practice, however, personal
computers are not yet fast enough nor the software well enough designed to make that feasible.