Planet warming? This isn’t news.

News is something you hear that you didn’t already know about.

Just for the record, Jean Baptiste Fourier described how gases in the earth’s atmosphere trap heat in 1824.

Even with relatively primitive measuring instruments, Fournier knew that a bare, moon-like planet at the Earth’s distance from the Sun, would be colder. By 1859, Irishman John Tyndall had calculated how any gas – including water vapour and our friend, CO2 – could trap heat on a planet. At the time, CO2 in our atmosphere was 280 parts per million, but Tyndall calculated that this trace carbon-dioxide altered heat radiation and temperature on the planet.

See “The Discovery of Global Warming”:

Meanwhile in Stockholm, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated that reducing atmosphere CO2 by half would lower the European temperature by about 5°C. Conversely, doubling the CO2 level in the atmosphere could raise the earth’s temperature by about 5°C. He called the effect a “hothouse,” and as an aside, he also pointed out that burning fossil fuels would contribute to this CO2 build-up.

Arrhenius enlisted fellow Swedish scientist Arvid Högbom, who calculated that the coal-burning factories of Europe were increasing the atmospheric CO2 by about 0.1% each year. No big deal. Arrhenius calculated it would take thousands of years for humans to significantly impact the earth’s climate. However, by the time he published his book on the subject in 1908, industrial coal effluents had already doubled, and his calculations for the future were out of date.

Just to keep us current with our little planet-warming experiment, and factoring in the discovery of liquid petroleum, atmospheric CO2 is now at about 400 parts-per-million, about 40% toward the doubling of CO2 that Arrhenius warned about, and we continue to pump about 20,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Oh yes, and by the way: These carbon emissions increase every year, even as we buy planet-saving hybrid SUVs and vegan shoes.

Expanding on Arrhenius’ “hothouse,” American geographer Glen Thomas Trewartha wrote An Introduction to Weather and Climate, explaining that atmospheric gases acted like “a pane of glass” in a greenhouse, raising planet temperatures, leading to the now-well-known “Greenhouse effect.” But that was seventy years ago. Scientist knew that atmospheric gases warmed the planet 150 years before Al Gore had to explain it to a bunch of dazed politicians.

See NPR on “Global Warming.”

In 1938, as temperature records began to show the warming, British coal engineer G.S. Callendar came right out and said it: burning coal and liquid fossil fuels is heating up the planet. However, the spoils of industrial economy provided plenty of incentive for wealthy industrialists to hire scientists to look for other reasons, perhaps a natural cycle, sunspot activity, or, like, whatever.

In 1957, fifty years ago, oceanographers Roger Revelle and Hans Suess concluded that pumping carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere amounted to “a large-scale geophysical experiment.” Meanwhile, Dr. James Lovelock designed detection equipment to track the exponential CO2 build-up in the atmosphere. In 1958, Charles Keeling installed one of the new instruments on the top of Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, left it there for several decades, and graphed the exponential build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, now known as the Keeling Curve.

A hand-drawn version of this curve showing the exponential growth of carbon in the atmosphere was pinned to the wall of the Greenpeace Chronicles office in 1978.

Meanwhile, automobile manufacturers and oil companies have followed the advice of spin doctor Frank Luntz, who advises, “Don’t ever say, “global warming … “this connotes catastrophic consequences.” Rather, say “climate change.” Hey, weather is always changing and Luntz assures his well-healed clients that this is “less of an emotional challenge.” Make use of broad, unassailable principles. Say, “We all want to move towards a healthier, safer future.” And, Luntz reminds industry’s marketeers, always “portray the scientific community as divided.”

Nevertheless, the human causes of global warming are not really news. We’ve known that atmospheric gases trap heat on the earth for 150 years. We’ve had the precise data for decades. Al Gore woke up a few sleepwalkers with his slideshow and film, but this only stirred up the denial machine to dream up more theories about sun spots.

Tick, tick, tick…

This was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Ecology . Feel free to respond, or trackback.