4 ms·
>Looking back, the greenhouse effect of CO2 was known in the 1800s, but even at the end of that century people thought it would take a millennium and be good.
by IIAOPSW 2y ago
>Looking back, the greenhouse effect of CO2 was known in the 1800s, but even at the end of that century people thought it would take a millennium and be good.
IIRC Charles Babbage wrote in his survey of British Industry for the royal society words to the effect of "it is not presently known how exactly the coal exhaust is recycled back into the ground".
Maybe some people correctly guessed that it wasn't recycled at all and in fact is an expendable (albeit quite large) resource, but their guess was as good as any other and far from something that was widely known and believed.
- ben_w 2y agoBy "the end of that century" I mean 1896 and Svante Arrhenius, which was a bit after Babbage died (1871). Arrhenius published an update in 1908 (not sure when he realised the mistake) accounting for the increased rate of CO2 emissions, stating that would be "beneficial"[0] in his own lifetime — he ended up dying in 1927, I'll let others decide if it was a net good or bad by that point. [0] Wikipedia's citation for this is "Arrhenius, S., Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe. New York, Harper & Row, 1908," — https://dn790004.ca.archive.org/0/items/worldsinmakingev00arrhrich/worldsinmakingev00arrhrich.pdf https://dn790004.ca.archive.org/0/items/worldsinmakingev00ar... I can find the "beneficial" part, but not (yet) the "in [his] lifetime" part. Quoting from the linked archive copy: "By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind." - page 63.