Gazing into the Past

Yup, there is over a century of science behind today's consensus among researchers that our emissions have warmed and will continue to warm the Earth to a level that threatens our civilization.

Listening to deniers moan and groan and carry on, you'd think it was a conspiracy the IPCC presto'd into existence a few decades ago.

As proof of the age of the knowledge that our fossil fuel habit endangers us, I present for your consideration Svante Arrhenius.

Now, if you're as strange as my high school chemistry teacher was, your response will be, "Svante Arrhenius? Gesundheit."

Arrhenius was, in arguably equal measure, both a physicist and a chemist, so it should come as no surprise that he was one of the founders of physical chemistry. It can also be argued that he was a mathematician, a geologist, an astronomer, an astrophysicist, a cosmologist, and a genuine ole jack-of-all-scientific-trades. Among his many notable qualifications and achievements, he became the first Swede to receive the Nobel Prize in chemistry, a vocal defender and legitimizer of the theory of panspermia, a likely atheist (a quality near and dear to my heart), and, most importantly (as far as this blog is concerned, anyway), a developer of a theory to explain ice ages, which ultimately led him to be the first scientist to conclude that the burning of fossil fuels and industrial production of CO2 were enough to cause the entire planet to warm. Arrhenius made his CO2/global surface temperature calculations way back in 1896.

It is essential to distinguish Arrhenius' work from the discovery of the greenhouse effect itself, which predated him by many years. It is also worth noting what he got right (water vapor feedbacks, and latitudinal effects), as well as what he got wrong (omission of cloud cover, rate of atmospheric build-up, overstating the beneficial effects, etc.).

Of course deniers, if they even know about Arrhenius and his scientific contributions, will desperately cling to that last part about the benefits, but the most critical takeaway message of his climate change research is that the temperature-increasing effects of pumping CO2 into the air have been known for far longer than the anti-science wingnuts would have you believe.