Climate science is nothing new
The above is an excerpt is from the 1958 educational documentary “Unchained Goddess” directed and produced by the legendary Frank Capra for Bell Labs for their television program “The Bell Telephone Hour.” The film went on to become a staple of middle school science classrooms across the United States for decades.
The science of climate change is hardly new. Indeed, starting with work by Joseph Fourier in the 1820s, scientists had understood that gases in the atmosphere could trap the sun’s heat, acting, in a way, like a greenhouse. In 1859 laboratory work by the Irish Victorian era natural philosopher and gentlemen scientist and explorer (those were the days eh?) John Tyndall identified several gases that did just that. In 1896 Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius completed a laborious numerical computation which suggested that cutting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by half would induce an ice-age by lowering the temperature in Europe some 4-5°C. Following on from this work, another Swede, Arvid Högbom, calculated the amounts of CO2 emitted by factories and other industrial sources. He determined that human activities were adding CO2 to the atmosphere at a rate roughly comparable to the natural geochemical processes that emitted or absorbed the gas. Arrhenius then made a calculation for doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere, and estimated it would raise the Earth’s temperature some 5-6°C. Not bad for Victorian era scientists as the numbers they came up with hold pretty much true today.
Almost 200 years later and not a single shred of evidence has been shown to disprove the basic theory behind the greenhouse effect, despite what some shills-for-hire may try to tell us. — DS
