Meet the team shaking up climate models

Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin was tall and rugged, with the flowing beard and raucus mustache popular in the late 1800s. As a young geology professor, he hiked the flatlands of southeast Wisconsin, surveying tracks of long-gone glaciers. It was popular at the time to speculate on what caused the rise and fall of ice ages, and Chamberlin seized on one theory that pointed to a gas.

“The effect of the carbon dioxide and water vapor is to blanket the earth with a thermally absorbent envelope,” he wrote in 1899. He concluded...