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Author Topic: The Father Of Global Warming?  (Read 3123 times)

NotaDenier

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The Father Of Global Warming?
« on: August 08, 2020, 03:19:07 PM »
https://www.aaas.org/interview-father-global-warming

On August 8th, 1975, Science published a paper by AAAS fellow Wallace S. Broecker titled "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" in which he argued that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide occurring because of the burning of fossil fuels would result in higher global temperatures. We recently interviewed Broecker, the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, about how warming has progressed since his ground-breaking paper, and what can or should be done about it.

kassy

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #1 on: August 08, 2020, 05:30:33 PM »
Broeckers take on the title:

Quote
So, for two different prizes that I won, I was introduced as "the father of global warming" because of this one lucky paper I wrote that was partially wrong, instead of being known for sixty years of science.   I once offered my students a $200 reward if they could find a previous reference to global warming in the scientific literature.  The reward was never claimed, but a postdoc found a reference in a 1958 Indiana newspaper account of two southern California scientists who were warning about industrialization causing climate change.  The scientists weren't named, but reading between the lines, they must have been Roger Revelle and Charles Keeling (both from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography).  Keeling started the CO2 readings at Mauna Loa that are always cited.   I think Keeling should be the "father of global warming."

Of course many more were important. Svente Arrhenius or maybe the always overlooked Högbom:

Quote
In 1896 Arrhenius completed a laborious numerical computation which suggested that cutting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by half could lower the temperature in Europe some 4-5°C (roughly 7-9°F) — that is, to an ice age level. But this idea could only answer the riddle of the ice ages if such large changes in atmospheric composition really were possible. For that question Arrhenius turned to a colleague, Arvid Högbom. It happened that Högbom had compiled estimates for how carbon dioxide cycles through natural geochemical processes, including emission from volcanoes, uptake by the oceans, and so forth. Along the way he had come up with a strange, almost incredible new idea.   

Hogbom
<=Simple models



It had occurred to Högbom to calculate the amounts of CO2 emitted by factories and other industrial sources. Surprisingly, he found 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. As another scientist would put it a decade later, we were "evaporating" our coal mines into the air. The added gas was not much compared with the volume of CO2 already in the atmosphere — the CO2 released from the burning of coal in the year 1896 would raise the level by scarcely a thousandth part. But the additions might matter if they continued long enough.

https://history.aip.org/climate/co2.htm

Also Revelle and the CO2 uptake in oceans:
https://history.aip.org/climate/Revelle.htm

Both links are from Spencer Whearts Discovery of Global Warming which is a great way to read up on all the earlier stuff.

All these discoveries build on eachother.

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Tor Bejnar

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #2 on: August 08, 2020, 05:31:53 PM »
Alexander von Humboldt
Quote
(14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a Prussian polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. ...

He was the first person to describe the phenomenon and cause of human-induced climate change, in 1800 and again in 1831, based on observations generated during his travels.
[emphasis added]
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Florifulgurator

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #3 on: August 08, 2020, 06:14:09 PM »
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-glaciology/article/early-discoverers-xxii-goethediscoverer-of-the-ice-age/7883A16803630B43E40A1364C62EEBD7

Excellent German video:


<Herr JW von Goethe does not really count for the purpose of this thread. The video is interesting and talks about how they were mostly trying to decode the ice ages. kassy>
« Last Edit: August 08, 2020, 06:26:52 PM by kassy »
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NotaDenier

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #4 on: August 09, 2020, 02:21:10 PM »



It had occurred to Högbom to calculate the amounts of CO2 emitted by factories and other industrial sources. Surprisingly, he found 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. As another scientist would put it a decade later, we were "evaporating" our coal mines into the air. The added gas was not much compared with the volume of CO2 already in the atmosphere — the CO2 released from the burning of coal in the year 1896 would raise the level by scarcely a thousandth part. But the additions might matter if they continued long enough.[/quote]

Love the evaporation of coal mines comment. Nice way to explain the science easily.
« Last Edit: August 09, 2020, 09:07:06 PM by NotaDenier »

NotaDenier

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #5 on: August 09, 2020, 02:24:45 PM »
This thread is a good discussion of how the science evolved. Agreed that the work was started in the 1800s. I also think that some of the theories were discovered independently of each other. If you can find a scientific paper from earlier than 1975 referencing AGW post it here.

Jim Hunt

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #6 on: August 09, 2020, 02:34:27 PM »
If you can find a scientific paper from earlier than 1975 referencing AGW post it here.

Any advance on 1967?

https://journals.ametsoc.org/jas/article/24/3/241/17328/Thermal-Equilibrium-of-the-Atmosphere-with-a-Given

Quote
According to our estimate, a doubling of the CO₂ content in the atmosphere has the effect of raising the temperature of the atmosphere (whose relative humidity is fixed) by about 2C. Our model does not have the extreme sensitivity of atmospheric temperature to changes of CO2 content which was adduced by Möller.
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kassy

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #7 on: August 09, 2020, 06:45:07 PM »
Blatant cheating via the link i posted above on Revelle:

Quote
While it was true that most of the CO2 molecules added to the atmosphere would wind up in the oceans within a few years, most of these molecules (or others already in the oceans) would promptly be evaporated out.   
Revelle could scarcely present that as a new discovery, for the reactions were all tabulated in data known since the 1930s.(25) But nobody had worked out this particular implication of the data. Greenhouse warming had seemed to nearly all scientists a subject of no practical significance. The few researchers who had looked into it had been interested in the oceans mainly because sea water would absorb CO2 on cooling and evaporate it on warming, which might help explain the famous puzzle of the ice ages. People had accordingly calculated how the CO2 content of water changed with temperature. They had seen no reason to take up the problem, which turned out to be quite different, of calculating how much new CO2 the sea water could absorb at a given temperature.   
Even after Revelle made the calculation, its implications were hard to grasp. When Arnold, visiting Scripps in January 1956, wrote about it to Anderson, his collaborator was skeptical of "Revelle's idea that 80% of the CO2 added to the atmosphere will stay there" (he pointed to the uncertainties in biomass uptake). Craig too found much uncertainty in such processes, and Revelle's insight had scant influence on the other two papers when they were published.(26) Even in Revelle's own paper with Suess, the bulk of the text reflected the pair's original belief that the oceans were absorbing most of the new CO2. The key paragraph, the one that said seawater needed to absorb only about a tenth as much gas as a simple-minded calculation supposed, stood apart like an isolated thought. In the archives it is visibly an addition, Scotch-taped onto the original draft.(27*)   
Revelle did revise a curve in the paper that he had calculated for the future of atmospheric CO2, finding now that the concentration of the gas should be rising after all. But in this calculation he assumed that industry would emit the gas in future at the same rate as at that time. Few people yet recognized that population and industrialization were shooting up exponentially. So Revelle predicted CO2 would level off, a few centuries hence, with a total increase of 40% or less.

https://history.aip.org/climate/Revelle.htm

So at that time it was still a developing idea.

The paper Jim Hunt posted does not name it but the quote is very much the crux of our problem.
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Tor Bejnar

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #8 on: August 10, 2020, 03:07:37 AM »
Quote
I also think that some of the theories were discovered independently of each other.
As Humboldt's writing was widely read throughout the 19th century, it is hard for me to believe any scientifically inclined person could have not know of his recognition of the interplay of all Earth systems and the possibility and reality of human influence on (and distruction of) those systems.  He had an influence on non-"science" writers such as Goethe (life-long friend) and Poe (on his last publication(s), anyway, according to H.'s biographer).  There is a reason so many places and species were named "Humboldt" or derivatives of his name.  His writing (in translation), I discovered a year ago, is near on 'impossible' to read, but reading Andrea Wulf's biography, The Invention of Nature, was spell bounding!
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KiwiGriff

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #9 on: August 10, 2020, 05:07:59 AM »
Father Mother.
 Eunice Foote at "the 1856 AAAS annual meeting in Albany, New York."
Quote
"Prof. Henry then read a paper by Mrs. Eunice Foote, prefacing it with a few words, to the effect that science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true. Mrs. Foote had determined, first, that the action of the rays increases with the density of the air. She has taken two glass cylinders of the same size, containing thermometers. Into one the air was condensed, and from the other air was exhausted. When they were of the same temperature the cylinders were placed side by side in the sun, and the thermometers in the condensed air rose more than twenty degrees higher than those in the rarified air. This effect of rarefaction must contribute to produce the feebleness of heating power in the sun's rays on the summits of lofty mountains. Secondly, the effect of the sun's rays is greater in moist than in dry air. In one cylinder the air was saturated with moisture, in the other dried with chloride of lime; both were placed in the sun, and a difference of about twelve degrees was observed. This high temperature of sunshine in moist air is frequently noticed; for instance, in the intervals between summer showers. The isothermal lines on the earth's surface are doubtless affected by the moisture of the air giving power to the sun, as well as by the temperature of the ocean yielding the moisture. Thirdly, a high effect of the sun's rays is produced in carbonic acid gas. One receiver being filled with carbonic acid, the other with common air, the temperature of the gas in the sun was raised twenty degrees above that of the air. The receiver containing the gas became very sensibly hotter than the other, and was much longer in cooling. An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a much higher temperature; and if there once was, as some suppose, a larger proportion of that gas in the air, an increased temperature must have accompanied it, both from the nature of the gas and the increased density of the atmosphere..."
http://www.searchanddiscovery.com/pdfz/documents/2011/70092sorenson/ndx_[/s]
Thanks for finding  this gem go to Eli Rabett.
 http://rabett.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-foote-effect.html
Barry at SK SC.
https://skepticalscience.com/climate-curve-fitting-fools-gold.html#61013

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oren

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #10 on: August 10, 2020, 10:51:46 AM »
1856. That's a great quote.

Sciguy

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #11 on: August 10, 2020, 07:39:13 PM »
I think that the idea behind a title like, "the father of global warming" is that a paper has to include the anthropogenic effects of adding carbon dioxide to atmosphere.  A lot of the papers sited above from the 1850s are dealing with the temperature effects of increasing pressure and determining which gases in the atmosphere are greenhouse gases, but don't look into the impact of burning coal (too early for oil and natural gas at that time). Arrhenius  is usually credited with that idea in the 1890s.  (Thanks for the info on Högbom Kassy, I didn't realize that Arrhenius had help with his paper).

After Arrhenius and Högbom in the 1890s, there was back and forth as to whether carbon dioxide would be saturated after a low initial amount and not lead to additional warming, and whether the oceans would absorb the extra carbon dioxide so it would accumulate in the atmosphere.  Revelle and Keeling answered the question about the oceans and the accumulation in the atmosphere in the late 1950s.  Gilbert Plass addressed the saturation of absorption bands in 1955.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2153-3490.1956.tb01206.x

Quote
The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic  Change
 By GlLBERT N. PLASS The Johns Hopkins  University, Baltimore,  Md.
(Manuscript received  August g 1955)
Abstract
The most  recent  calculations of the infra-red flux in the  region of the 15 micron CO2 band show that the average surface temperature of the earth increases 3.6” C if  the C02 concentration in the atmosphere is  doubled  and decreases 3.8’ C if  the CO2 amount is halved,  provided  that no other factors  change  which  influence the radiation  balance. Variations in CO2 amount of this magnitude must have occurred during geological history; the resulting temperature changes were sufficiently large to influence the climate. The CO2 balance is discussed. The CO equilibrium between   atmosphere   and  oceans is calculated with and without CaCO3  equilibrium, assuming  that  the  average temperature changes with the CO2 concentration by  the amount predicted by the CO2 theory. When the total CO2 is  reduced below a critical value, it is found that the climate continuously oscillates between a glacial and an inter-glacial stage with a period of tens of thousands of years; there is  no possible stable state for the climate. Simple explanations are provided by the CO2 theory for the increased precipitation at the  onset of a glacial period, the time lag of millions of years between  periods of mountain building  and  the ensuing glaciation, and the severe glaciation at the end of the Carboniferous. The extra CO2 released into the atmosphere by  industrial processes and other  human activities may have caused the temperature rise during  the present  century. In contrast with other  theories of climate,  the CO2 theory predicts that  this warming trend  will continue, at least for several centuries.

I would argue that the title should go to Plass.
« Last Edit: August 10, 2020, 08:15:38 PM by Ken Feldman »

Pmt111500

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Re: The Father Of Global Warming?
« Reply #12 on: August 12, 2020, 06:35:03 AM »
Arrhenius is fine for me, since he said it might be beneficial for Sweden if there was more carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. But generally I find the topic bad, we all know it's happening and the reason for it, no need to assign a personal name for fathering it. Republicans at least would want it to be carried to full term, as they want to drown the coastlines all over the globe.

(Edit: this was i think the fourth time I did the closing statement and no republican has thus far denied it. Draw your own conclusions)
« Last Edit: August 12, 2020, 05:51:26 PM by Pmt111500 »