[MCN] Milestones in climate science: What we've long known

[Lance Olsen]

Climate Science Milestones Leading To 1965 PCAST Report
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6264/1046.full

1824: French mathematician Joseph Fourier reasons 
that Earth would be colder in the absence of an 
atmosphere, describing the foundations of the 
greenhouse effect.

1856: Eunice Foote's unpublished research on the 
absorption of radiant energy by carbon dioxide 
and other gases in the atmosphere is read at the 
10th AAAS Annual Meeting in Albany, New York.

1861: Irish physicist John Tyndall finds that 
gases such as water vapor, carbon dioxide, and 
methane trap heat efficiently, whereas oxygen and 
nitrogen gases do not.

1896: Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physicist, 
chemist, and 1903 Nobel Prize winner, estimates 
that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide 
would raise Earth's temperature by 5 to 6 degrees 
Celsius, averaged across all latitudes.

1938: English engineer Guy Stewart Callendar 
determines that a half-century of fuel combustion 
has added 150,000 million tons of carbon dioxide 
to the atmosphere.

1957: Former AAAS president Roger Revelle and 
Austrian geochemist Hans Suess show that 
absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide by the 
ocean is slower than previously believed.

1958: American chemist Charles David Keeling 
begins recording concentrations of atmospheric 
carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory in 
Hawaii, confirming an increasing trend in 
atmospheric CO2. Observations at Mauna Loa 
continue today.

1965: The President's Council of Advisors on 
Science and Technology (PCAST) report on 
environmental pollution to President Lyndon B. 
Johnson cautions that the accumulation of 
atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of 
fossil fuels would "almost certainly cause 
significant changes" to the environment.

(Sources: The Office of Science and Technology 
Policy, American Institute of Physics, Scripps 
Institution of Oceanography)
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Controlled capitalism Š had been a truly 
colossal success. From the end of the Second 
World War until the mid-1970s the American and 
European economies were uplifted by many years of 
rapid growth, bringing affluence from the 
relatively few to almost all."

"In the late 1970s the tendency to control capitalism was abruptly reversed."

" Š the most striking feature of our 
turbo-capitalist times, the hollowing-out of 
democratic governance over the economy."

Edward Luttwak, Turbo-Capitalism.
1998 in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
1999 in the U.S. by Harper Collins.
ISBN  0-06-019330-1
------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://bigskynet.org/pipermail/missoula-community-news_bigskynet.org/attachments/20151127/02fd7e3b/attachment-0002.html>