Editing Radiative forcing (section)

=== History ===
Transport of energy and matter in the Earth-atmosphere system is governed by the principles of [[equilibrium thermodynamics]] and more generally [[non-equilibrium thermodynamics]].  During the first half of the 20th century, physicists developed a comprehensive description of [[radiative transfer]] that they began to apply to stellar and planetary atmospheres in [[radiative equilibrium]].  Studies of radiative-convective equilibrium (RCE) followed and matured through the 1960s and 1970s.  RCE models began to account for more complex material flows within the energy balance, such as those from a water cycle, and thereby described observations better.

Another application of equilibrium models is that a [[perturbation theory|perturbation]] in the form of an [[thermodynamic operation|externally imposed intervention]] can estimate a change in [[thermodynamic state|state]].  The RCE work distilled this into a ''forcing-feedback framework'' for change, and produced [[climate sensitivity]] results agreeing with those from [[general circulation model|GCM]]s.  This [[conceptual framework]] asserts that a homogeneous disturbance (effectively imposed onto the top-of-atmosphere energy balance) will be met by slower responses (correlated more or less with changes in a planet's surface temperature) to bring the system to a new equilibrium state. ''Radiative forcing'' was a term used to describe these disturbances and gained widespread traction in the literature by the 1980s.<ref name="nrcrf"/>{{rp|19-23}}