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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 rem

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.»

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.»