1951 American marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson publishes the New York Times bestseller The Sea Around Us, including observations about pronounced warming in the Arctic regions of the Earth In a chapter in The Sea Around Us entitled “The Global Thermostat,” Rachel Carson observes, “Now in our lifetime we are witnessing a startling alteration […]
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1938 English engineer and amateur meteorologist Guy Callendar concludes that humans have added about 150,000 million tonnes of CO2 to the air over the previous 50 years “The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature,” a paper by Guy Callendar appearing in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, concludes that […]
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1904 Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius concludes that the Earth’s temperature might increase by 5 to 6 degrees Celsius with a doubling of atmospheric CO2 Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius follows early 19th century scientists Jean-Baptiste Fourier and John Tyndall to investigate the role of greenhouse gases in warming Earth’s surface. Tens of thousands of hand calculations […]
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1861 Irish physicist John Tyndall demonstrates experimentally that water vapor and other gases warm the atmosphere John Tyndall, in the article “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction,” reports on an experimental apparatus to demonstrate and measure the heat-trapping impact of […]
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1824 French mathematician and physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier first hypothesizes that the atmosphere plays a significant role in mediating temperature on Earth Fourier, in the article “General Remarks on the Temperature of the Earth and Outer Space,” likens the effect of the Earth’s atmosphere in regulating global temperature to a glass covered box: “The […]
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