One hundred and twenty nine years ago, on this day, December 24th, 1895, Svante Arrhenius explains the work that went in…
“His preliminary calculations showed that the required changes in CO2 were in the order of 50%. Hogbom, who was present, confirmed that those changes could have occurred in geological times. It remained, however, to demonstrate this quantitatively. The construction of the model which enabled him to do so occupied him for most of 1895. Writing to a friend at the end of the year, he found it “unbelievable that so trifling a matter has cost me a full year” (5) ”
Svante Arrhenius to Gustaf Tammann, December 24, 1895, Arrhenius Collection, Center for History of Science, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm in Crawford, E. 1997 Arrhenius’ 1896 Model of the Greenhouse Effect in Context Ambio, Vol. 26, No. 1, Arrhenius and the Greenhouse Gases (Feb., 1997), pp. 6-11
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 295ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Svante Arrhenius had gone through a divorce and partly to distract himself he’d spent a year doing insane calculations about the effects that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would have. He had produced this work. He had presented this work and it was about to be published.
What we learn is that in the days before ENIAC computers, if you were a mathematician it was like that joke “Did you hear about the constipated mathematician? He had to work it out with a pencil.”
What happened next is his work was kind of disregarded thanks to a misunderstanding of how carbon dioxide works in the stratosphere, but it wasn’t lost altogether because some people took it seriously. Then Guy Callendar did the sums also without a computer and presented that work to the Royal Meteorological Society in front of Kenneth Hare and others.
Fun fact. Arrhenius died in 1927. And Guy Callendar died in 1964, on the same day of the year, October 2nd https://allouryesterdays.info/2022/10/01/october-2-1927-64-svante-arrhenius-and-guy-callendar-die/
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
December 24, 1968 – “Earthrise” photo
December 24, 1990 – Australia as renewable energy superpower