Arrhenius greenhouse
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">history
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/09/10/19th-century-tumult-over-climate-change-and-why-it-matters-today">https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/09/10/19th-century-tumult-over-climate-change-and-why-it-matters-today</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/deborah-coen-533005" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Deborah Coen</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/institutions/yale-university-1326" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Yale University</a></font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Back in the 19th century, when tractors were still pulled by horses and the word “computer” meant a person hired to carry out tedious calculations, climate science made front-page news.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One European forester remarked in 1901 that few questions had “been debated and addressed from so many sides and so relentlessly” as that of the climatic effect of deforestation. Recalling this crowded, noisy and wide-ranging conflict – a “hurly-burly” over the “climate question,” as the scientist <a href="https://www.springer.com/us/book/9780792361282" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Eduard Brückner</a> called it at the time – reminds us that climate science has not always been the elite, well-mannered pursuit that it is today.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Might this popular, participatory approach have been an advantage? Given <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/climate/global-energy-demand.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the ongoing rise in global greenhouse gas emissions</a> five years after a <span class="caps" style="">U.N.</span> report found that humans are “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24292615" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">the dominant cause</a>” of global warming, it’s a question worth asking.</font></p><h2 style="line-height: 2em; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The science of climatology is born</font></h2><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As I write about in my <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo24768042.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">book about the history of climate science</a> in the 19th century, the possibility that human actions might wreak havoc with the climate became a widespread concern for ordinary people across Europe, North Africa and the Americas.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Farmers knew intuitively that even a small change in baseline climate greatly increased the risk of extremes, and a single drought could ruin a farming community, even if followed by years of good weather. As one farmer in Central Europe put it in a letter to a local paper, you couldn’t rightly grasp the import of climate change unless you were “dependent on the yield of a few small plots of land,” and until you had “kept a lookout for a hearty rainfall day by day throughout the dry summer for several years, in vain…You must have seen your favorite fruit trees mourning with wilting leaves.”</font></p><figure class="align-center zoomable" style="margin: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font><figcaption><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="caption">19th-century photographs like this one, by the self-educated Bohemian naturalist Friedrich Simony, contribute evidence of recent glacier retreat related to anthropogenic climate change. Simony was among the earliest explorers of the high Alps, and his images of them were of wide scientific and popular interest in his day.</span> <span class="attribution">Friedrich Simony</span></font></figcaption></figure><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When a dry spell hit, the question of the day was whether man-made changes to the environment, including deforestation, swamp drainage and urban growth, might be robbing the atmosphere of the moisture necessary for agriculture and human health to flourish. The evidence came from historical records of extreme weather events, as well as from newly established experimental forestry stations. It was hashed out in newspapers, town councils and national parliaments, where the trade-offs between conservation and development were likewise up for debate.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In this historical context, the science called <a href="http://climatology.co.uk/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">climatology</a> developed into a multifaceted research program that offered many different things to many different people. It was, on one hand, an academic field of study, straddling physics, geography and medicine, which investigated the sensitivity of living things to the complex variation of atmospheric conditions across the surface of the Earth.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But it was also a public-oriented enterprise intent on empowering individuals and communities to improve their own health and prosperity. </b>Climatology informed doctors and patients, for instance, about weather that might speed or delay a recovery; it taught engineers about the height of floodwaters and the strength of storms; it offered farmers knowledge of rainfall, extreme temperatures, the length of growing seasons and the frequency of damaging hail. Climatology was a planetary science, yet one that was also intimately concerned with the variability of atmospheric conditions on the scale of a single field of wheat.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What’s more, it was a 19th-century version of what we have come to call “citizen science.</b>” It relied on people of all walks of life to report on the weather and its effects on their health and crops. Farmers and vintners supplied harvest dates to track the seasons from one year to the next, while sailors and fishermen informed early schemes for classifying clouds and winds.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Exchanges like these had far-reaching consequences. They kept scientists’ attention focused on issues of concern to their communities; they inspired experts to clarify their terms in everyday language; they honed the acuity with which the public perceived changes in their natural environment; and they gave rise to vibrant discussions of science in the popular press.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ultimately, this give-and-take sustained the public’s trust in science. <a href="https://www.zamg.ac.at/cms/de/images/geophysik/karl-kreil/view" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Karl Kreil</a>, the founder of the largest climatological observing network in continental Europe in the 19th century, proudly proclaimed his “dual” identity, both scholar and public servant. His successor, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/108249a0" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">Julius Hann</a>, insisted on the importance of “public feeling” for the science of weather and climate.</font></span></p><h2 style="line-height: 2em; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The merits of messy science</font></h2><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To a scientist today, this approach may sound unpromising, neither fish nor fowl, incapable of producing a unified theory or yielding reliable forecasts. Indeed, 19th-century climatology has been dismissed by historians as a scientific <a href="https://history.aip.org/climate/climogy.htm" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">“backwater,”</a>mere prologue to the modern science of climate that dawned with the computer age.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, I see the power of 19th-century climatology as lying precisely in its <a href="http://ceupress.com/book/orderly-mess-0" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none;">messiness</a>, to borrow a term from Helga Nowotny. Climatology didn’t aspire to become a “pure” science. Indeed, its impurity makes it worth remembering today. As unruly as it might appear to scientists of the 21st century, its multifariousness seems altogether appropriate to a subject as complex as the Earth’s climate. Climate change is not one phenomenon but many, and it means different things to different living creatures. It is a catastrophe unfolding at different spatial and temporal scales, from the distant to the here and now. It demands not one way of knowing but many.</font></p><p style="margin: 1em 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://YYY.theguardian.com/environment/<b>2005/</b>jun/30/climatechange.climatechangeenvironment2</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx
</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The father of climate change</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ian Sample looks at how the study of the climate has moved from being a relatively minor branch of science to one that now dominates most others, thanks largely to the work of one man</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ian Sample</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thu 30 Jun 2005 06.55</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Behind the treelined embankment that borders the campus of Stockholm University lies building 92E, a red brick villa as big as a fire station, its back turned to Roslagsvägen, the main artery linking the capital city with Norrtälje 70km away.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What few markings there are on the building suggest nothing of its history. A sign above the entrance identifies it as Cafe Bojan, a student canteen, and a few shirtless students on a bench in the morning sun recall it as nothing more.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the end of the 19th century, building 92E was the home and laboratory of<b> Svante Arrhenius, a chemist who became Sweden's first Nobel prizewinner.</b> He was destined to have a bigger impact than he could have imagined, far beyond his mainstream work. Unwittingly, he uncovered secrets of the Earth's atmosphere and in doing so triggered research into what many see as the biggest threat to modern humans. He is arguably the father of climate change science.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That title would be a surprise, even to him. The son of a land surveyor, Arrhenius thrived at school, showing a particular aptitude for arithmetic, but his diversity of thought and penchant for maverick theories dealt him a hefty blow at university. His PhD research, which he began at Uppsala University to the north of Stockholm, focused on the <b>conductivity of electrolytes,</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">but the ideas he put forward in his thesis baffled his professors and he was awarded the lowest possible pass grade. At once, any hopes of staying on at Uppsala were destroyed, and Arrhenius embarked on a tour of European laboratories before landing a job in Stockholm several years later.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Arrhenius became interested in a debate occupying the scientific community, namely the cause of the ice ages. Could it be, he wondered, that vast swings in the levels of atmospheric CO2, lasting tens of millions of years, were the trigger?</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The link between CO2 and the Earth's temperature had been made years beforehand. It was the French scientist Joseph <b>Fourier</b> who first realised that certain atmospheric gases shrouded the planet like a bell jar, transparent to sunlight, but absorbing to infrared rays. It means the atmosphere is heated from above and below: first, by sunlight as it shines through and second by the infrared the Earth emits as it cools overnight.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Arrhenius set himself the task of working out just how much water and CO2 in the atmosphere warmed the planet. From others' work, he knew that CO2 was only part of the process. While CO2 and other gases trapped infrared radiation and so heated the atmosphere, warmer air holds more water vapour, itself the most potent contributor to the greenhouse effect. So, if atmospheric CO2 levels increased, water vapour would ensure the warming effect was seriously magnified.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What followed was a year doing what Arrhenius described as "tedious calculations".</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> His starting point was a set of readings taken by US astronomer Samuel Langley, who had tried to work out how much heat the Earth received from the full moon</span>. Arrhenius used the data with figures of global temperatures to work out how much of the incoming radiation was absorbed by CO2 and water vapour, and so heated the atmosphere.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Between 10,000 and 100,000 calculations later, Arrhenius had some rough, but useful, results that he published in 1896</b>. If CO2 levels halved, he concluded, the the Earth's surface temperature would fall by 4-5C. There was a flipside to his calculations: doubling CO2 levels would trigger a rise of about 5-6C.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Beyond the argument over ice ages it wasn't lost on Arrhenius that human activity, in the form of widespread burning of coal, was pumping atmospheric CO2 above the natural levels that help make the Earth habitable. Almost as a passing comment, he estimated that coal burning would drive a steady rise in CO2 levels of about 50% in 3,000 years, a prospect he found entirely rosey. At a lecture that same year, he declared: "We would then have some right to indulge in the pleasant belief that our descendants, albeit after many generations, might live under a milder sky and in less barren surroundings than is our lot at present."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the first to put hard figures on the greenhouse effect, it's unsurprising Arrhenius's estimates weren't spot on. He thought it would take millenia to see a 50% rise in CO2 - but modern measurements show a 30% rise during the 20th century alone. He thought a doubling of CO2 would raise temperatures by 5-6C. Scientists now say 2-3C is more likely.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Over the next decades, his work was criticised, backed up and criticised again</b>. Many disregarded his conclusions, pointing to his simplification of the climate and how he failed to account for changes in cloud cover and humidity. The oceans would absorb any extra CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, and any remainder would be absorbed by plant life, leading to a more lush landscape, sceptics argued.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In 1938, nine years after Arrhenius had died a Nobel prizewinner for his work on ionic solutions, English engineer Guy Callendar gave the greenhouse theory a boost.</b> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">An expert on steam technology,</span> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">he took up meteorology as a sideline and became interested in suggestions of a warming trend. Callendar pieced together temperature measurements from the 19th century onwards and saw an appreciable rise. He went on to check CO2 over the same period and discovered levels had increased about 10% in 100 years. The warming was probably due to the higher levels of CO2</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The existence of an increasing greenhouse effect was hotly debated until the postwar funding of the 1950s kicked in and researchers began to get firm data<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 1956, physicist Gilbert Plass confirmed adding CO2 to the atmosphere would increase infrared radiation absorbed, adding that industrialisation would raise the Earth's temperature by just over 1C per century. By the end of the 1950s, Plass and other scientists in the US started warning government officials that greenhouse warming might become a serious issue in the future.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Unwittingly, the US especially had already started monitoring what many believed were the direct effects of a warming world. Submarines operating in the Arctic Circle took accurate readings of the thickness of the ice sheets above them.</b> When the Pentagon released the data nearly 40 years later, it revealed a startling melting of the ice, on average a 40% thinning of 1.3m since 1953.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In the 1960s, researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego </b>took on the testing challenge of taking a vast number of measurements of atmospheric CO2. <b>The aim was to establish a baseline level</b> with which future readings in a decade or so could be compared.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Charles Keeling spent two years taking measurements in Antarctica and above the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii but reported that even in this short period, CO2 levels had risen. He concluded that the oceans weren't absorbing greenhouse gases being pumped out by industry. Instead, emissions were driving levels of CO2 higher. "It was a seminal discovery. For the first time, scientists knew that the oceans weren't going to absorb all this carbon dioxide</span>," says Mike Hulme at the Tyndall Centre for climate change research at the University of East Anglia.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Still, few saw the greenhouse effect and the warming it would bring as being a problem. At the time,<b> computer models were suggesting modest increases, perhaps 2C in hundreds of years.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>By the 1980s, climate change had become a megascience, </b>attracting scientists from diverse fields, each attacking the problem from a different angle. One technique was especially useful. Deep cores of ice cut from Greenland and elsewhere held pockets of air dating back hundreds of thousands of years</span>. By analysing the trapped air, scientists worked out CO2 levels in the atmosphere during past ice ages. In 1987, a core cut from central Antarctica showed that in the previous 400,000 years, CO2 had dropped to 180 parts per million (ppm) during the most extreme glacial periods and climbed as high as 280ppm in warmer times, but not once had been higher. In the outside air, CO2 was measured at 350ppm, unprecedented for nearly half a million years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To mainstream scientists, evidence that warming was down to human activity was becoming too big to ignore. While scientists uncovered evidence for the greenhouse effect and warming it was producing, others pointed to different processes impacting on global climate. Volcanos, for example, blast millions of tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere that form aerosol particles which reflect sunlight back into space. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Phillipines sent about 20m tonnes of the gas into the atmosphere, leading to a global cooling of around 0.5C a year later. Scientists now believe that the warming experienced in the early 20th century can largely be explained by the lack of volcanic activity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Variations in the sun's intensity</b> have also been fingered as a driver of climate change. According to Joanna Haigh at Imperial College London, about a third of the warming since 1850 can be explained by solar activity. The identification of disparate contributors to warming has been seized upon by a minority who claim global warming is driven far more by nature than human activity, and the ensuing controversy is still not settled.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>By 1988, the United Nations had established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to review relevant research</b>. The panel's latest estimate points to a warming of 1.4-5.8C by 2100, depending on what strategies, if any, are adopted to curb emissions. The 20th century saw a rise in temperature of 0.6C, about half of which occured since 1970.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Arguably the most concerted effort to cut global emissions has been triggered by the Kyoto Protocol. Since ratification began in 1997, more than 100 countries have adopted the protocol, which for the first time committed them to cutting emissions of six greenhouse gases.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, barely a week goes by without a major study on climate change. A flurry of papers started the year with warnings that the Gulf Stream would grind to a halt, ski resorts would move to higher altitudes and Antarctic glaciers were melting fast. More than 100 years after Arrhenius set out to discover why the world fell into periodic ice ages, the scientist has become a pillar of the megascience that is global warming research.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Back in Stockholm' meteorology department, Erland Kallen is musing about progress since Arrhenius first set about his calculations. "Even when I came to this field 20 years ago, I was very sceptical about global warming. There were too many uncertainties I just couldn't see how anyone could say anything sensible about it. Now, I struggle to see what other explanation there could be."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Timeline</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1898</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Swedish scientist, Svante Arrherius, puts forward the theory of the greenhouse effect and calculates that doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase temperatures by 5°C to 6°C</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1956</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>US weapons researcher Gilbert Plass</b> pursues climate research in his free time and analyzes how carbon dioxide traps heat. He announces that climate change could be a severe problem to future generations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>1979</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The First World Climate Conference</b>, sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization, is held in Geneva, Switzerland. Extremeweather events earlier during the decade had focussed public attention on climate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1982</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet show dramatic temperature oscillations in a single century from the past, an extremely short period for climate change. Scientists also call 1981 the warmest year on record.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>1997</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Kyoto Protocol</b> is negotiated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2012 in the developed countries including the former communist bloc.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2005 Kyoto Protocol enters into legal force on Feb 16. The treaty was ratified by more than 140 countries. Concentration of carbon dioxide now stands at 372 parts per million, higher than at any time in at least the past 420,000 years.</font></div></div></div></div></div>