13 ms·

First Paper to Link CO2 and Global Warming (1856)

216 points by Red_Tarsius 7y ago

jacobush 7y ago
I want to learn to write like this: "An atmosphere of [carbon dioxide] would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature…must have necessarily resulted."
- ehnto 7y ago
  Read a few Jules Verne books and give it your best shot.
  - spats1990 7y ago
    One may suppose, too, that a healthy smattering of works by the great Edgar Allen Poe might come in handy, disregarding, of course, their largely unscientific nature; furthermore, if one wishes to write in such a fashion, one must devote oneself to the cause of attractive semicolon usage... a largely forgotten art in these modern times.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Yeah, that is neat, but it doesn't have the nice punch of must have necessarily resulted. from above.
- bendbro 7y ago
  That flows. I think "if as some suppose" is pentameter?
- scoopertrooper 7y ago
  I have to say, reading her prose is an absolute joy. https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002152491/page/382 https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002152491/page/382
jokoon 7y ago
I wonder how intelligence agencies and the military are preparing for climate change.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  The last article I saw on that wasn't exactly encouraging: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...
- rosege 7y ago
  The Pentagon regularly puts out papers on what they are thinking/doing.
newnewpdro 7y ago
There's some old German food/nutrition researcher I read who mentioned in passing that co2 acted as a blanket in the atmosphere warming the planet. I can't remember the author or title of the book, it was something from the 1800s I was skimming from archive.org. I remember being dumbfounded at the time and pasting the excerpt to some friends on IRC. People have known atmospheric co2 warms the planet for a very long time. This book wasn't even about climate, it was about diet and evolution. It turns out if you want to talk about the history of evolution, you have to talk about the atmosphere and how it varied going through oxygen and carbon-rich periods.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Maybe it was a common way of thinking about atmosphere back then. I remember while reading up on the history of climate science, that Fourier found that the planet should be markedly colder than it is, purely from physics. Then calling atmosphere a blanket that keeps it warm. That must have been in the early 1800s. So thought was moving in the right direction long ago.
- gioele 7y ago
  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#History «The existence of the greenhouse effect was argued for by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838 and reasoned from experimental observations by Eunice Newton Foote in 1856. John Tyndall expanded her work in 1859 by measuring radiative properties of a wider spectrum of greenhouse gases. The effect was more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who made the first quantitative prediction of global warming due to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, the term "greenhouse" was not used to refer to this effect by any of these scientists; the term was first used in this way by Nils Gustaf Ekholm in 1901.»
punnerud 7y ago
In the Norwegian engineer paper (TU) from 1960 the main discussions of their time was that they had to get away from burning trees as energy source and use oil/coal or water fall to get the energy to supply the industry. Lot of talks about deforestation with examples that we have not recovered from today (example Røros).
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  One of the tragedies of our failure to tackle GHG emissions is that now reasonable pathways to stay under 2C of warming require massive negative carbon sequestration after 2040, and at the moment the only way to do that is burning wood and capturing the CO2 emissions. The volume of wood which will have to be burnt each year is more than the volume of all international shipping. That is going to mean covering huge areas of land in industrial plantations which will probably damage wildlife further. Because we’ve delayed action, we’re entering into the teeth of a dilemma which will drive further mass extinctions whatever we do, either remove habitat for wood production for negative carbon, or accept high levels of warming.
  - abraae 7y ago
    Why does sequestration involve burning wood? Isn't it easier to leave the carbon in wood form and build e.g furniture, buildings, structures out of wood, and leave the carbon there?
    - Danieru 7y ago
      Now many deck chairs do are you willing to pay for, on a yearly basis? I would bet few people are willing to purchase 100 or so new deck chairs per year. Burning seems a sensible alternative.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - Brakenshire 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
whitman 7y ago
https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/ https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/
sid-kap 7y ago
The paper refers to CO2 as "carbonic acid gas". At this time, did they know that CO2 was also produced by burning fossil fuels? Or by respirating living things?
- vidarh 7y ago
  CO2 was first hypothesized specifically as a gas making up the difference in mass between charcoal and the remnants of burning it in the 1600's by Jan Baptist van Helmont[1]. That respiration of animals emits CO2 was determined at least by the 1750's. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baptist_van_Helmont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baptist_van_Helmont
- eesmith 7y ago
  Yes to both. A Google Scholar search based on "carbonic acid gas" and "coal" found Babington, William. "A case of exposure to the vapour of burning charcoal." Medico-chirurgical transactions 1 (1809): 83. at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2128797/pdf/medcht00073-0105.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2128797/pdf/med... : > When carbon in combustion combines with oxygen we obtain carbonic acid gas, and at the same time in proportion to its moisture, more or less hydrocarbonous gas is evolved. A Google Scholar search based on "carbonic acid gas" and "exhalation" found Allen, William, and William Hasledine Pepys. "XVII. On the changes produced in atmospheric air, and oxygen gas, respiration." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 98 (1808): 249-281. at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1808.0018 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1808... with quotes like: > In this experiment we meet with a remarkable fact, viz. that as much carbonic acid gas was given off in 5½ minutes, as in the former experiment in eleven minutes ; so that it appears, whenever atmospheric air is taken into the lungs, it returns charged with about 8 per cent, carbonic acid
- labster 7y ago
  I think other commenters have answered your question, but I thought I'd talk a little on carbonic acid. Carbon dioxide partitions into water as carbonic acid. This is the key mechanism in ocean acidification. Of course the rate is affected by pH of the oceans, there's a buffering action going on between carbonate, bicarbonate, and carbonic acid depending on how many protons are available. It's also why pure water sitting open to the air will have a slightly acidic pH. The oceans at the bottom have a decent layer of carbonate material accumulated from shells, which are also at equilibrium with the ocean, but the other direction (accepting protons). But since the oceans are so big, to increase the pH of the oceans you'd have to send the surface water to the bottom. Mixing the oceans is kind of a slow process -- around 500 years. But in theory we'll get some long term climate help from the ocean floor (well, if the methane clathrates don't get us first).
Brakenshire 7y ago
I’ve always found climate scepticism strange, because of its emphasis on refusing to accept the connection between rising temperatures and CO2. This really seems to be the least defensible position which could be chosen. The “scepticism” is disputing really basic science which has been well understood for a long time, and it’s in that sense that calling it denial is accurate. It would be much more defensible to accept a lower level of climate sensitivity, but dispute the mechanisms which cause higher sensitivity, or possible future positive feedback effects.
- decoyworker 7y ago
  My father has been going on about cloud coverage lately. The conspiracy being that they have a cooling effect and invalidate some liberal climate change agenda.
  - tonmoy 7y ago
    Cloud coverage impact on global temperature is one of the last unknowns hard for us to predict. Hence it is the last defense any serious scientist for denial
  - scottlocklin 7y ago
    Cloud coverage is in fact left out of most climatological models (too hard to predict, and they would dominate all other factors). https://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/role.html#COMP_MODS https://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/role.html#COMP_MODS
    - decoyworker 7y ago
      Yeah, being left out of the models plays into the conspiracy factor. My father mentioned that climate scientists are shills knowingly leaving out this data.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    We have a clearly observed and measured rapid global warming in the last decades. So whatever mechanism might counteract global warming, it obviously allowed the rapid warming to happen and unless anyone can present a plausible model why the counteraction should get stronger than any further warming, it won't prevent further warming.
herogreen 7y ago
The idea of a link between CO2 and a greenhouse effect was expressed before that, by Claude Pouillet in 1838 (but maybe not published in a paper). sources: https://jancovici.com/changement-climatique/croire-les-scientifiques/depuis-combien-de-temps-sait-on-que-lhomme-agit-ou-agira-sur-le-climat/ https://jancovici.com/changement-climatique/croire-les-scien... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect "1838: Claude Pouillet, a French physicist, attributes the natural greenhouse effect to water vapor and carbon dioxide. He concludes that any change in the amount of water vapor, such as CO2, is expected to result in climate change." (google translate). edit: I think it was this paper https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95017r/f1.image.r=Pouillet,+Claude-Servais-Matthias.langFR https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95017r/f1.image.r=Pou... but I have not checked (cannot Ctrl-F).
jgrahamc 7y ago
Babbage wrote about using tree rings to study the ancient climate in 1838: https://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/charles-babbage-and-climate-change.html https://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/charles-babbage-and-climate-cha...
dankohn1 7y ago
My (12 minute long) KubeCon + CloudNativeCon keynote in Barcelona this year used Foote's discovery of global warming as an example of simultaneous invention, and compared it to the creation of over a dozen container orchestrators other than Kubernetes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmGFgZ889kY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmGFgZ889kY https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YkvOgnnbTqWIzQnyaUUp3S5AMbZHNPMUMlTF2aGQgk0/ https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YkvOgnnbTqWIzQnyaUUp...

216 points by Red_Tarsius 7y ago

I want to learn to write like this: "An atmosphere of [carbon dioxide] would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature…must have necessarily resulted."

ehnto 7y ago
Read a few Jules Verne books and give it your best shot.
- spats1990 7y ago
  One may suppose, too, that a healthy smattering of works by the great Edgar Allen Poe might come in handy, disregarding, of course, their largely unscientific nature; furthermore, if one wishes to write in such a fashion, one must devote oneself to the cause of attractive semicolon usage... a largely forgotten art in these modern times.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Yeah, that is neat, but it doesn't have the nice punch of must have necessarily resulted. from above.
bendbro 7y ago
That flows. I think "if as some suppose" is pentameter?
scoopertrooper 7y ago
I have to say, reading her prose is an absolute joy. https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002152491/page/382 https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002152491/page/382

jokoon 7y ago

I wonder how intelligence agencies and the military are preparing for climate change.

PavlovsCat 7y ago
The last article I saw on that wasn't exactly encouraging: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...
rosege 7y ago
The Pentagon regularly puts out papers on what they are thinking/doing.

newnewpdro 7y ago

There's some old German food/nutrition researcher I read who mentioned in passing that co2 acted as a blanket in the atmosphere warming the planet. I can't remember the author or title of the book, it was something from the 1800s I was skimming from archive.org. I remember being dumbfounded at the time and pasting the excerpt to some friends on IRC. People have known atmospheric co2 warms the planet for a very long time. This book wasn't even about climate, it was about diet and evolution. It turns out if you want to talk about the history of evolution, you have to talk about the atmosphere and how it varied going through oxygen and carbon-rich periods.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Maybe it was a common way of thinking about atmosphere back then. I remember while reading up on the history of climate science, that Fourier found that the planet should be markedly colder than it is, purely from physics. Then calling atmosphere a blanket that keeps it warm. That must have been in the early 1800s. So thought was moving in the right direction long ago.
gioele 7y ago
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#History «The existence of the greenhouse effect was argued for by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838 and reasoned from experimental observations by Eunice Newton Foote in 1856. John Tyndall expanded her work in 1859 by measuring radiative properties of a wider spectrum of greenhouse gases. The effect was more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who made the first quantitative prediction of global warming due to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, the term "greenhouse" was not used to refer to this effect by any of these scientists; the term was first used in this way by Nils Gustaf Ekholm in 1901.»

punnerud 7y ago

In the Norwegian engineer paper (TU) from 1960 the main discussions of their time was that they had to get away from burning trees as energy source and use oil/coal or water fall to get the energy to supply the industry. Lot of talks about deforestation with examples that we have not recovered from today (example Røros).

Brakenshire 7y ago
One of the tragedies of our failure to tackle GHG emissions is that now reasonable pathways to stay under 2C of warming require massive negative carbon sequestration after 2040, and at the moment the only way to do that is burning wood and capturing the CO2 emissions. The volume of wood which will have to be burnt each year is more than the volume of all international shipping. That is going to mean covering huge areas of land in industrial plantations which will probably damage wildlife further. Because we’ve delayed action, we’re entering into the teeth of a dilemma which will drive further mass extinctions whatever we do, either remove habitat for wood production for negative carbon, or accept high levels of warming.
- abraae 7y ago
  Why does sequestration involve burning wood? Isn't it easier to leave the carbon in wood form and build e.g furniture, buildings, structures out of wood, and leave the carbon there?
  - Danieru 7y ago
    Now many deck chairs do are you willing to pay for, on a yearly basis? I would bet few people are willing to purchase 100 or so new deck chairs per year. Burning seems a sensible alternative.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - Brakenshire 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

whitman 7y ago

https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/ https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/

sid-kap 7y ago

The paper refers to CO2 as "carbonic acid gas". At this time, did they know that CO2 was also produced by burning fossil fuels? Or by respirating living things?

vidarh 7y ago
CO2 was first hypothesized specifically as a gas making up the difference in mass between charcoal and the remnants of burning it in the 1600's by Jan Baptist van Helmont[1]. That respiration of animals emits CO2 was determined at least by the 1750's. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baptist_van_Helmont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baptist_van_Helmont
eesmith 7y ago
Yes to both. A Google Scholar search based on "carbonic acid gas" and "coal" found Babington, William. "A case of exposure to the vapour of burning charcoal." Medico-chirurgical transactions 1 (1809): 83. at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2128797/pdf/medcht00073-0105.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2128797/pdf/med... : > When carbon in combustion combines with oxygen we obtain carbonic acid gas, and at the same time in proportion to its moisture, more or less hydrocarbonous gas is evolved. A Google Scholar search based on "carbonic acid gas" and "exhalation" found Allen, William, and William Hasledine Pepys. "XVII. On the changes produced in atmospheric air, and oxygen gas, respiration." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 98 (1808): 249-281. at https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1808.0018 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1808... with quotes like: > In this experiment we meet with a remarkable fact, viz. that as much carbonic acid gas was given off in 5½ minutes, as in the former experiment in eleven minutes ; so that it appears, whenever atmospheric air is taken into the lungs, it returns charged with about 8 per cent, carbonic acid
labster 7y ago
I think other commenters have answered your question, but I thought I'd talk a little on carbonic acid. Carbon dioxide partitions into water as carbonic acid. This is the key mechanism in ocean acidification. Of course the rate is affected by pH of the oceans, there's a buffering action going on between carbonate, bicarbonate, and carbonic acid depending on how many protons are available. It's also why pure water sitting open to the air will have a slightly acidic pH. The oceans at the bottom have a decent layer of carbonate material accumulated from shells, which are also at equilibrium with the ocean, but the other direction (accepting protons). But since the oceans are so big, to increase the pH of the oceans you'd have to send the surface water to the bottom. Mixing the oceans is kind of a slow process -- around 500 years. But in theory we'll get some long term climate help from the ocean floor (well, if the methane clathrates don't get us first).

Brakenshire 7y ago

I’ve always found climate scepticism strange, because of its emphasis on refusing to accept the connection between rising temperatures and CO2. This really seems to be the least defensible position which could be chosen. The “scepticism” is disputing really basic science which has been well understood for a long time, and it’s in that sense that calling it denial is accurate. It would be much more defensible to accept a lower level of climate sensitivity, but dispute the mechanisms which cause higher sensitivity, or possible future positive feedback effects.

decoyworker 7y ago
My father has been going on about cloud coverage lately. The conspiracy being that they have a cooling effect and invalidate some liberal climate change agenda.
- tonmoy 7y ago
  Cloud coverage impact on global temperature is one of the last unknowns hard for us to predict. Hence it is the last defense any serious scientist for denial
- scottlocklin 7y ago
  Cloud coverage is in fact left out of most climatological models (too hard to predict, and they would dominate all other factors). https://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/role.html#COMP_MODS https://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/role.html#COMP_MODS
  - decoyworker 7y ago
    Yeah, being left out of the models plays into the conspiracy factor. My father mentioned that climate scientists are shills knowingly leaving out this data.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  We have a clearly observed and measured rapid global warming in the last decades. So whatever mechanism might counteract global warming, it obviously allowed the rapid warming to happen and unless anyone can present a plausible model why the counteraction should get stronger than any further warming, it won't prevent further warming.

herogreen 7y ago

The idea of a link between CO2 and a greenhouse effect was expressed before that, by Claude Pouillet in 1838 (but maybe not published in a paper). sources: https://jancovici.com/changement-climatique/croire-les-scientifiques/depuis-combien-de-temps-sait-on-que-lhomme-agit-ou-agira-sur-le-climat/ https://jancovici.com/changement-climatique/croire-les-scien... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect "1838: Claude Pouillet, a French physicist, attributes the natural greenhouse effect to water vapor and carbon dioxide. He concludes that any change in the amount of water vapor, such as CO2, is expected to result in climate change." (google translate). edit: I think it was this paper https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95017r/f1.image.r=Pouillet,+Claude-Servais-Matthias.langFR https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95017r/f1.image.r=Pou... but I have not checked (cannot Ctrl-F).

jgrahamc 7y ago

Babbage wrote about using tree rings to study the ancient climate in 1838: https://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/charles-babbage-and-climate-change.html https://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/charles-babbage-and-climate-cha...

dankohn1 7y ago

My (12 minute long) KubeCon + CloudNativeCon keynote in Barcelona this year used Foote's discovery of global warming as an example of simultaneous invention, and compared it to the creation of over a dozen container orchestrators other than Kubernetes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmGFgZ889kY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmGFgZ889kY https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YkvOgnnbTqWIzQnyaUUp3S5AMbZHNPMUMlTF2aGQgk0/ https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YkvOgnnbTqWIzQnyaUUp...