"Presumably the physicists involved have crunched some numbers and therefore come up with the fears about the Greenhouse Effect."
They did; care to challenge the math of this early Nobel winner?
Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) was a Swedish scientist that was the first to claim in 1896 that fossil fuel combustion may eventually result in enhanced global warming. He proposed a relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature. He found that the average surface temperature of the earth is about 15oC because of the infrared absorption capacity of water vapor and carbon dioxide. This is called the natural greenhouse effect. Arrhenius suggested a doubling of the CO2 concentration would lead to a 5oC temperature rise. He and Thomas Chamberlin calculated that human activities could warm the earth by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
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or maybe the findings he based his work upon? Nobody has knocked Tyndall down in the intervening 152 years. Go for it.
Many readers will know that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’. Another breakthrough occurred in science that fateful year, this one with an Irish connection. The discovery attracted much less attention than Darwin’s theory of evolution at the time, but it has become one of the hottest topics in science today (literally).
In July 1859, the Irish physicist John Tyndall, one of the great scientists of the 19th century, established that certain atmospheric gases absorb heat quite strongly. This innocuous-sounding discovery was established over a few short weeks, but it provided the solution to one of the great riddles of science: the famous ‘greenhouse effect’.
The greenhouse effect was first proposed by the French polymath Joseph Fourier, almost a century before Tyndall’s experiments. Fourier had wondered how the earth maintains its warm temperature, and he speculated that while heat from the sun passes easily through our atmosphere on the way to earth, heat radiated outwards by the warm earth must somehow be trapped in the atmosphere. The hypothesis was highly controversial, as it was widely assumed that gases are transparent to heat.
Tyndall, a fierce proponent of the new experimental method of science, devised a series of simple experiments to test Fourier’s hypothesis. Working in the dusty basement of the Royal Institution in London in the summer of 1859, he soon established that, while most gases are indeed transparent to light and heat, some gases – carbon dioxide and water vapour in particular – can absorb heat energy at certain wavelengths. As traces of each gas were known to exist in the earth’s atmosphere, the puzzle of the earth’s temperature was solved.
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