The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two scientists who have studied the warming of the Earth's climate. Global warming has not only been discovered in recent decades, but as early as the 19th century scientists predicted that carbon dioxide would one day change the earth's temperature.
Fourier: The first scientist to study climate change
Early scientific and technological advances in the early 19th century led to early research on climate. One of them was French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier, who spent his life studying the mechanics and equations that control the transfer of heat. But he was fascinated by one question: Why is the Earth so warm? Based on his estimates of how much energy the sun hits the Earth, it should be much cooler than it actually is.
In 1807, Fourier wrote his treatise on heat conduction, "The Propagation of Heat," in order to understand the equations of heat conduction, he established Fourier analysis theory. In 1820, Fourier calculated that an object assumed to be the size of the Earth and the same distance from the Sun should be cooler than the Earth, if only the thermal effects of solar radiation were taken into account. So there must be some other reservoir. Although Fourier thought, space radiation may account for a large proportion of the other sources of heat, but he put forward for the first time, the earth's atmosphere may be an insulation body, the atmosphere as a greenhouse, save the part of the radiation from the sun come in heat makes the earth be like without the atmosphere of the moon, lit by the sun's temperature rise sharply, The temperature drops sharply out of the sun.
Fourier made the following prediction: "The development and progress of human society, combined with the forces of nature, may bring about marked changes in the state of the earth's surface, the distribution of water resources, and the movement of the atmosphere over a wide area of the earth. Such a change must change the average temperature in those regions over the centuries." It was one of the first predictions of how the earth's climate might change -- though at the time it was not clear why, how it would change or what gases would affect it.
Eunice Newton Foot: First discovery of 'greenhouse gases'
In the 1820s, French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier hypothesized that the atmosphere acts like a greenhouse. More than 30 years later, Amateur American scientist and prominent suffragist Eunice Newton Foote tested Fourier's hypothesis with rigorous scientific experiments.
Born in 1819, Foote attended Emma Willard, a local girls' college at the age of 17, which is now known as "the mecca of female education". Foote completed the planning of research projects in the chemistry laboratory of the school, and mastered the use and operation skills of chemical experimental instruments.
In 1856, Foote tested the heat absorption capacity of different gases, the first such experiment in human history. At the time, she worked with a few simple instruments, including two glass bottles 76 centimeters long and 10 centimeters in diameter, each containing a thermometer. She filled the two glass bottles with different gases and compared their thermal effects on sunlight with temperature changes. Foote found that moist air absorbed more solar radiation than dry air. Carbon dioxide absorbs more solar radiation than ordinary air. She also found that, under the same conditions, glass bottles filled with carbon dioxide were much hotter than those filled with hydrogen or oxygen. Thus, Foote revealed the important role of carbon dioxide and water vapor in the greenhouse effect. Foote wrote about the results and made a startling prediction: "What happened to a glass bottle full of carbon dioxide could happen to our planet... If the atmosphere were filled with these gases, the temperature of the earth would rise very high." The paper was published in the American journal Science in 1856. At the time, global climate change was not obvious, but Foote prospectively predicted that changes in carbon dioxide concentrations would affect global temperatures.
Research paper written by Foote
It was the first real experiment in the history of climate physics, but unfortunately hers was later forgotten. And when she was to present her research before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the most prominent scientific organization in the Country at the time, women were not allowed to speak, so her report was read by a male colleague.
For more than a century, especially in the early days, climate scientists, mostly in Europe, do not seem to have discussed or cited Foote's work. It wasn't until the 21st century that retired petroleum geologist Raymond Sorensen came across a description of Foote's work in the 1857 volume of the old edition of the Almanac of Scientific Discovery that he had collected. He knew immediately that this was the first paper to link carbon dioxide to climate. He published his findings publicly in 2011. More and more scientists and historians began to see the value of Foote's work.
John Tyndall: First evidence of a link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the greenhouse effect
After years of observation and research, The Irish physicist and meteorologist John Tyndall concluded in 1859 that water vapor is important for keeping the Earth's atmosphere warm, as are other gases such as carbon dioxide and oxygen. He began to do a lot of calculations, varying the values of these gases in the formula to get different results, and finally concluded that increasing gases like carbon dioxide would have a very significant effect on the climate. This is what we now call global warming, also known as the greenhouse effect. Tyndall discovered that carbon dioxide has a very strong ability to absorb heat.
Tyndall was also the first to come up with the blue sky theory, known as the "Tyndall effect". When people use the Tyndall effect to explain the color of the sky, thought to be due to the presence of large amounts of dust in the atmosphere, water droplets, ice crystals, and many other small particles, and the sun through the atmosphere, will inevitably encounter these particles, relatively short wavelengths of the sun's rays of blue light scattering to the sky, so the whole sky to appear blue. The idea was so popular that it was not until 1900, when Lord Rayleigh, a British physicist, discovered Rayleigh scattering, that the "blue mystery" of the sky was finally solved.
Svante Arrhenius: created the world's first climate change model
The final advance in climate science came in 1896, when Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius created the world's first model of climate change.
In 1896, Allen Unis published his paper "The Effect of Atmospheric CARBON dioxide on the Temperature of the Earth", in which he not only proposed the idea that "human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will increase the temperature of the earth's surface", but also gave a calculation formula. He suggested that if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled, the earth's surface temperature would rise by five or six degrees Celsius, not much different from the models later calculated by some climate scientists. In 1908 Arrhenius wrote another paper, "The World Made," which further showed that the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase to a remarkable degree in the coming centuries because of rapid industrial growth. But he reckons it would take 3,000 years for the constant burning of fossil fuels to double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Arrhenius calculated the rate at which the earth's temperature was rising, but did not take into account the rate at which human civilization was evolving - as technology improved, more and more coal was being pulled out of the ground for thousands of years and fed into the engine of industrial civilization.
Speaking of catastrophes, Arrhenius and other scientists of his generation are even more concerned that volcanic eruptions could severely disrupt the world's climate. Scientists in the 19th century knew that sudden changes in the climate would be fatal to humanity, but they could not imagine the dangers posed by a gradual increase in temperature. They did not foresee that global warming would bring many serious problems to human beings, such as the challenges posed by climate warming to migratory invasive species, and the complex biosphere feedback phenomenon after the disappearance of glaciers. In fact, Arrhenius believes that a warmer earth would bring more benefits to humanity.
Guy: For the first time, human activity is linked to climate change
Despite the establishment of meteorology well before the 18th century, we see that the scientists who found a link between global warming and humans were mostly from other fields, and Guy was no exception. Guy is an engine engineer, but he has a hobby of collecting weather data. In collecting weather data, he has observed that global temperatures have risen for nearly half a century. Curious about the causes of global warming, Guy has spent thousands of hours in his spare time communicating with scientists and researchers around the world and collecting evidence from hundreds of weather stations. After taking into account various factors that could have contributed to a rise in global temperatures and doing tens of thousands of manual calculations, Gay found that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had risen from 274 to 292 parts per million in the 19th century to 300 parts per million in 1937. The increase in carbon dioxide levels is not only highly correlated with global temperature rise, but can also be directly attributed to increasing human production activities.
Guy's 1937 paper "Artificial Production of CARBON Dioxide and its Effect on Temperature" was noticed by more professional people a year later. Guy was able to present his findings in front of six meteorologists. Unfortunately, although Gay's conclusions were based on rigorous scientific procedures, experts first questioned the accuracy of the carbon dioxide and temperature data in Gay's paper, rather than choosing to test the data and simply ignore Gay's findings. One of the experts added bluntly: "Guy is not an expert on meteorology." So Guy's paper was not widely publicized. Undaunted, Gay continued to publish more comprehensive papers, still working on them until his death in 1964.
Charles Keeling: The most compelling scientific evidence for human "interference" with nature
"Keeling curve"
Gay's efforts were not in vain. There were always scientists who took an interest in Guy's discoveries. American geochemist Charles Keeling was one of them. Learning from Gay's experience, Keeling collected data on earth's carbon dioxide using an instrument he had helped develop that was known throughout the scientific community for its accuracy.
Keeling began measuring carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 1958. His preliminary measurements showed that carbon dioxide concentrations had a strong seasonal cycle, falling each summer as plants absorbed carbon dioxide. By 1961, however, he had concluded that carbon dioxide concentrations were indeed steadily rising. The famous "Keeling curve" was one of his results. The Keeling curve is a graph that accurately shows the amount of carbon dioxide on earth increasing year by year. Keeling's research shows that it is the increasing production activities of humans that have caused the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, leading to global warming and the greenhouse effect.
To date, the Keeling curve provides the most convincing evidence that human activity is responsible for increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth. The keeling curve shows that in 1958, the average co2 concentration was 315ppm, and by the spring of 2018, the average co2 concentration was 406ppm. Meanwhile, measurements of the gas trapped in bubbles in polar ice cores show average concentrations of carbon dioxide between 275 and 285 parts per million (PPM) over the past 10,000 years, with concentrations only rising sharply after the 19th century. The rise in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere is mirrored in the oceans, where dissolving carbon dioxide causes surface waters to become more acidic, up by about a third since the start of the industrial revolution.
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