This is about global warming specifically, not the currently fashionable “climate change”. Various scientists have been aware of the notion of variations in climate and human influence on that for some time. What I’m wondering about is who is the first person to raise the alarm that 1) human activity is contributing to global warming, 2) this is likely to continue if nothing is done about it 3) with disastrous effects for the planet.
I see Wiki says that the 50s-60s were a time of increasing concern, but doesn’t mention who was the first visionary to put it together and sound the alarm.
German explorer and polymath Alexander von Humboldt was actually the first person to describe human-induced climate change from his observations in Venezuela around 1800. The first observations of the specific mechanism of climate warming by persistence of carbon dioxide released by human activity was Hans Seuss, a physical chemist working in atmospheric chemistry and cosmochemistry, when he looked at ratios of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere versus in tree rings and other dead vegetation sources. Although not well known outside of atmospheric physics circles, the “Seuss Effect”, looking at dilution of naturally produced 14C in the atmosphere was the first quantitive indicator of alterations in the carbon dioxide concentration in the upper atmosphere causing the already well-understood “greenhouse effect”, and was the reason that Charles Keeling led the establishment of the Mauna Loa Observatory and what became the Global Monitoring Division of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory.
As far as understanding the implications of unlimited carbon emissions on the effects on the planet, the first major studies came out in the early 1960s, culminating in a 1965 report from the Presidential Science Advisory Committee titled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment”. The oil and gas industry studied this extensively and even considered taking various actions to mitigate, including investment in alternative technologies such as solar and nuclear fusion power before electing to suppress the science and engage in a campaign of public denial and subversion as detailed in Naomi Oreskes’ testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and in the book Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Erik Conway.
It was theorised in the 19th century already. John Tyndall and Eunice Foote wrote about the heating effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the 1850s, and Svante Arrhenius continued that work in the 1890s. It was, of course, well understood already that the burning of fossil fuels (which at the time was mostly coal) released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
It should also be noted that there is no different between “global warming” and “the currently fashionable ‘climate change’.” Disruptions in climate dynamics are a direct result of the addition of thermal energy into the atmospheric and hydrological system, and that these can result in massive tropical storms, an increase in tornado activity, increasing precipitation events like both monsoons and massive snowstorms, et cetera, are a result of how that added thermal energy results in more concentrations of moisture and disrupts normal cycles of water transport.
There was a poster some years ago that tried to make some kind of convoluted argument about how the Earth should be treated as a static thermodynamic system and that adding more thermal energy via greenhouse effect would simply even out temperature gradients and result in fewer storms, which, aside from the empirical evidence that this has not been the case, is also a failing to comprehend that the atmosphere of the Earth is a non-equilibrium thermodynamic system that is in constant action, redistributing energy to different latitudes and between the atmosphere and ocean gyres, both in the daily day-night cycle and the seasonal cycle due to axial tilt of the Earth. That activity of the system is heavily driven by the amount of moisture in the air, and the hotter the atmosphere is, the more water it can carry.
The term “climate change” is used to convey to the public that alterations to global climate circulation dynamics are not just about higher surface temperatures, but “global warming” is still a technically accurate description of the essential phenomenon and doesn’t represent any change in how the mechanism works or indication any obfuscation about the science.
As the various different names already proposed would suggest, there is no unambiguously identifiable single individual who could be credited with the role of “prophet”, but there are many candidates. In the modern era, James Hansen is widely regarded as such an individual. He is both a climate scientist and an activist, and his famous testimony before Congress in 1988 did a great deal to bring the issue to public attention. Hansen also created one of the first successful climate models.
Another important contributor was Michael Mann, though here we’re definitely getting further away from being “the first”, but Mann nevertheless became prominent in both the scientific community and in public awareness when he produced the first thorough reconstruction of the climate of the past 2000 years. The reconstruction showed, not only that the famous Medieval Warm Period was neither as warm nor as globally significant as present warming, but that warming in the post-industrial era constituted an abnormally steep “hockey stick” upswing in average global temperature.
The significance of Hansen’s and Mann’s contributions to public awareness is seen, perversely, in the extent to which both have been attacked by deniers.
In fact, overall warming of the globe as a whole could actually lead to some specific portions of the globe cooling down. The British Isles, for instance, might freeze, but that’s not a refutation of global warming, because the British Isles are not the globe.
The only thing it gets wrong is the rate of coal consumption, which is now over 8.5 billion tons per year (as compared to the 2 billion mentioned). So, the effect became considerable in one century instead of a few.
Of course, the fact that it showed up in Popular Mechanics meant it must have appeared in scientific circles well before (which it did, as described by others here).
So, in your view, the only change possible for the climate is for the earth to get warmer? I would be interested in how you explain away the cold times that have been documented.
I don’t know what cold times you are referring to, perhaps the “little ice age” which may have been caused by sun cycles, or the “year without summer” which was a short term cooling caused by a major valcano.
But in terms of anthropogenic climate change due to carbon polution, the affect on average global temperature is uniformly towards warming, and is unprecedented in geologic time in terms of the rapidity of the change.
These would be the secondary effects. For example, one theory is excessive ice melt from Greenland going south could disrupt the Gulf Stream (and the whole ocean flow conveyor system) which keeps Iceland and northern Europe remarkably warm compared to continental areas at similar latitudes. Something more substantial happened when Lake Agassiz suddenly drained a vast amount of fresh water into Hudson Bay (and on past Greenland) about 12,000 years ago. Allegedly it brought on another return ice age for a few centuries.
Similarly, local climate disruptions like the recent record temperatures and drought on the Pacific northwest, or the incidence of strong tropical storms in the Atlantic, are affected by increased temperatures. In the first case, by disrupted Pacific flows, in the latter case, the heated ocean surface induces a much higher humidity in tropical storms exacerbating their strength and amount of precipitation.
I’m not sure who first predicted these sort of secondary effects of excess storms etc., beyond the basic “hey, we’re heating the earth.” Anyone have any input in that?
I know that even in the 1970’s it was mentioned that the Sahara was slowly encroaching southward, but much of that was ascribed to poor agricultural policies. Similarly the Aral is attributed to ecological mismanagement rather than climate, although I’m sure that helped.
As a Canadian, the idea that the world would be a bit warmer would seem like a good idea for us - but experience so far seems to indicate it brings more heat than is desirable, droughts, forest fires, and other unwelcome events. The infamous ice storm in Quebec in 1998 destroyed the electrical systems feeding a large area, including a city of over a million that limped by with most of the feeder lines downed.
Wiki says Joseph Fourier (Fourier transform fame) in 1820’s
Fourier’s consideration of the possibility that the Earth’s atmosphere might act as an insulator of some kind is widely recognized as the first proposal of what is now known as the greenhouse effect,[15]
I think giving Fourier credit in this respect is a bit of a stretch. He did, remarkably, conclude that the earth would not be as warm as it is from the direct effects of solar radiation alone, and that something else must be at play, but he was unsure what. One of his hypotheses was maybe interstellar radiation. His other hypothesis, thinking that perhaps the atmosphere acted as some kind of insulator, was influenced by earlier experiments by de Saussure in which a vessel covered with glass was observed to warm up to a considerable degree when exposed to sunlight. This is indeed the true greenhouse effect, but that’s not at all how the atmosphere works.
The idea that the atmosphere “traps” heat like a greenhouse is a common misconception. A greenhouse traps heat by literally preventing the escape of warmer air through convection. The atmosphere contributes to warming by virtue of certain radiatively active gases that absorb and then re-emit IR radiation coming from the surface. CO2 and methane are two such important gases. This understanding of radiative transfer properties, and how they’re heavily influenced by the atmospheric concentration of these active gases, is crucial to understanding climate change.
The English physicist John Tyndall was the first to study this molecular nature of radiative heat transfer in CO2. So in terms of the very early pioneers of the multidisciplinary field that today we call climate science, Tyndall made foundational contributions to the underlying physics, whereas Fourier didn’t really do anything notable to advance the science.
Would it be possible to make a greenhouse that’s even better at trapping heat by coating the glass in some kind of substance that allows the sun’s infrared light to enter the greenhouse but then reflects any infrared light that bounces off the insides to keep it contained in the greenhouse (and warming the air)?
I believe it would make virtually no difference. Most solar energy is in the visible light spectrum anyway, with a rapid dropoff beyond the near-infrared. In terms of blocking outgoing radiation, most glass is already fairly opaque beyond the near-infrared, say wavelengths much longer than 1400 nm. Many plastics, however, are generally quite transparent to this kind of IR (the transmission spectrum is discontinuous, but still, generally true) yet some greenhouses are sheathed in polyethylene sheets and work just as well as glass ones. Blocking air convection is the main thing.
About half of the energy in sunlight is in the visible spectrum (400 to 700 nm, see below), and ceramic glass will block most infrared (IR, >700 nm), about 75% of UVA (320-400 nm) and nearly all UVB and UVC (down to ~ 100 nm). So, most of the energy that gets into a greenhouse is visible radiation that gets converted into ambient thermal energy (“heat”).
@wolfpup makes a valid point that how a greenhouse works is not really the same mechanism as the “greenhouse effect” of radiation-trapping “greenhouse gases” (GHG) because virtually all atmospheric heat transfer in terrestrial conditions is via atmospheric convection or evaporation, the only mechanism to transfer energy from the Earth into space is via radiation. It should be understood that the term “greenhouse effect” is a metaphor, not an attempt to rationalize the actual mode of energy transfer.
No. You can’t make a material that has different transmissibilities to the same wavelengths in different directions (i.e., that lets infrared in, but doesn’t let it out). Such a material would violate the laws of thermodynamics.
You can, however, make a material that lets visible light through (in both directions), but blocks infrared (in both directions). Such as ordinary glass. Which is how the greenhouse effect works.
