by Long before the current political gap on climate change and before the US Citizens’ War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s crisis of climate change.
The year was 1856. Foote’s short scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat – the driving force of global warming.
Carbon dioxide is a odorless, tasteless, transparent gas that forms when people burn fuels, including coal, oil, petrol and wood.
If the surface of the earth heats, you could think that the heat would only radiate back into space. But it’s not that easy. The atmosphere remains hotter than expected, mainly due to greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and atmospheric water vapor, which absorb all outgoing heat. They are called “greenhouse gases” because, similar to the glass of a greenhouse, they catch the heat into the earth’s atmosphere and radiate it again on the surface of the planet. The idea that the heat included with the atmosphere was known, but not the cause.
Foote carried out a simple experiment. She put a thermometer in two glass cylinders, pumped carbon dioxide gas in one and air in the other and put the cylinder in the sun. The cylinder, which contained carbon dioxide, became much hotter than that of air, and Foote realized that carbon dioxide is severely absorbed heat in the atmosphere.
The discovery of the high heat absorption of carbon dioxide gas she led to the conclusion that “… if the air had mixed with it a higher proportion of carbon dioxide than currently mixed, an increased temperature”.
A few years later, in 1861 individual substance. “
Tyndall also recognized the possible effects on the climate and said that “every variation” of water vapor or carbon dioxide must create a “climate change”. He also noticed that the contribution of other hydrocarbon gases such as methane on climate change could afford and wrote that “an almost unfounded addition of gases such as methane would have” great effects on the climate “.
Man already increased carbon dioxide in the 19th century
In the 1800s, human activities already dramatically increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is burning more and more fossil fuels and ultimately oil and gas-increasing an increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the air.
The first quantitative estimate of the climate change induced by carbon dioxide was carried out by Svante Arhenius, a Swedish scientist and Nobel laureate. In 1896 he calculated that “the temperature in the Arctic regions would increase by 8 or 9 degrees Celsius if carbon dioxide rose to 2.5 or three times”. Arrhenius’ estimate was probably conservative: since 1900 the atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen from around 300 parts per million to around 417 ppm due to human activities, and the Arctic has already heated up by about 3.8 ° C.
Nils Ekholm, a Swedish meteorologist, agreed and wrote in 1901 that “the current burning of the boxing fries is so great that if it continues it undoubtedly had to cause a very obvious increase in the middle temperature of the earth.” Ekholm also stated that That carbon dioxide in a layer in the atmosphere over water vapor layers worked, where small amounts of carbon dioxide were important.
All of this was understood more than a century ago.
Initially, the scientists thought that a possible small increase in the earth’s temperature could be an advantage, but these scientists could not imagine that the useful consumption of fossil fuels gives an enormous increase in fossil fuel. In 1937 the English engineer Guy Callendar documented how rising temperatures correlated with increasing carbon dioxide level. “Due to fuel incineration, humans have added around 150,000 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air in the past half century,” he wrote and “actually increased the world temperatures …”.
A warning to the president in 1965 and then …
In 1965, scientist Us President Lyndon Johnson warned of the growing climate cranic and the conclusion: “Man unexpectedly carries out a huge geophysical experiment. Within a few generations, it burns the fossil fuels that have slowly accumulated in the earth in the past 500 million years. “The scientists published clear warnings of high temperatures, melting ice caps, increasing sea levels and acidification of ocean waters.
In half a century, which has followed this warning, more melted from the ice, the sea level has increased and the acidification due to the constantly increasing absorption of carbon dioxide, which forms carbon dioxide, has become a critical problem for ocean boys.
Scientific research has significantly strengthened the conclusion that the human -generated emissions lead to dangerous warming of the climate and a variety of harmful effects by burning fossil fuels. However, politicians have reacted slowly. Some episodes used by some fossil fuel companies to deny and burden the truth, while others want to “wait”, despite the overwhelming evidence that damage and costs will continue to increase.
In fact, reality now quickly overtakes scientific models. The megaddodic and heat waves in the western USA record high temperatures and zombie in Siberia, massive forest fires in Australia and in the western United States, relentless, intensive golf coast and European rainfalls and more powerful hurricians are all hardener with increasing climate interruption.
For decades, the world knew about the risk of warming, which exists through excessive carbon dioxide levels, before the invention of cars or coal -fired power plants. Eunice Footen, a rare scientist in her time, explicitly warned against basic science 165 years ago. Why didn’t we listen to more precisely?
Neil Anderson, a retired chemical engineer and chemistry teacher, contributed to this article. This article was originally published in 2021.
This article will be released from the conversation, a non -profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and trustworthy analyzes to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Sylvia G. Dee, Rice University
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Sylvia G. Dee receives funds from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
