Japanese scientist Syukuro Manabe wrote the most influential climate science paper of all time in 1967.
Manabe led a team of computer programmers from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory to add missing physics to their weather model. At the time, the computers were not very powerful so to get the model to work, Manabe needed to make the physics as simple as possible. This meant simplifying the code to quantify how the air exchanged heat and water vapour with the land, ocean and ice.
They wanted to know the minimum of discrete levels to use in his model atmosphere. They also wanted to know which greenhouse gasses it was important to include in the model to adequately represent the way temperatures vary with altitude, as these gasses absorb heat emitted from the Earth’s surface, but at different levels. This model was too computer-intensive so they had to build a simpler one-dimensional model. They wanted to show how radiation and clouds interact to redistribute heat and water vapour through the atmosphere.
Manabes simple model could accurately redistribute water vapour in a way that real deep clouds do, with water vapour broadly increasing in concentration up to a certain level of humidity. This increase was found to intensify the warming from carbon dioxide by around 75%. This water vapour feedback estimate still holds today.
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-influential-climate-science-paper.html