wiki.nsdl.org

"Beginning in 1938 and continuing throughout his life, the British engineer and scientist Guy Stewart Callendar (1898-1964) identified important links between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming. He compiled weather data from stations around the world that clearly indicated a climate warming trend of 0.5 C in the early decades of the twentieth century. He investigated the carbon cycle , including natural and anthropogenic sources and sinks, and the role of glaciers in the Earth's heat budget. His estimate of 290 ppm for the nineteenth-century background concentration of CO2 is still valid, and he documented an increase of ten percent between 1900 and 1935,which closely matched the amount of fuel burned. Based on new understanding of the infrared spectrum and calculations of the absorption and emission of radiation by trace gases in the atmosphere, Callendar established the CO2 theory of climate change in its recognizably modern form, reviving it from its earlier, physically unrealistic and moribund status. In 1939 Callendar wrote about the ongoing changes in the atmosphere and their likely effects:

As man is now changing the composition of the atmosphere at a rate which must be very exceptional on the geological time scale, it is natural to seek for the probable effects of such a change. From the best laboratory observations it appears that the principal result of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxidewould be a gradual increase in the mean temperature of the colder regions of the earth.

Callendar's landmark studies revived the anthropogenic carbon dioxide theory of climate change. In 1938 he identified links among fuel combustion, rising CO2 levels, increased sky radiation, and the observed rise in world temperatures from 200 stations. "By fuel combustion man has added about 150,000 million tons of carbon dioxide to the air during the past half century." Callendar estimated from the best available data that approximately three quarters of this had remained in the atmosphere. He used the radiation absorption coefficients of carbon dioxide and water vapor to show the effect of carbon dioxide on "sky radiation," From this he estimated the increase in mean temperature due to the artificial production of carbon dioxide to be at the rate of 0.003C per year at the present time. The temperature observations at 200 meteorological stations were used to show that world temperatures have actually increased at an average rate of 0.005C. per year during the past half century. Callendar grouped temperature data in England on a town by town basis based on population growth rates. In that way he effectively eliminated the urban heat island effect, which might have skewed his data. Interestingly, Callendar used his home weather station to record an unbroken data set from 1942 to 1964. Today, the theory that global climate change can be attributed to an enhanced greenhouse effect due to elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources, primarily from the combustion of fossil fuels is called the "Callendar Effect." "

Gosh, Mr Wizard, I wonder what his email address was?

ROFL

morons

wiki.nsdl.org

"In 1896, Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927) published a landmark paper that examined the effect of different levels of atmospheric CO2 (carbonic acid) concentration on the temperature of the planet. His energy budget model, the first of its kind, took into account solar and terrestrial radiation, including the fourth-power relationship between temperature and radiation, and contained estimates of the absorption of terrestrial radiation by water vapor and carbon dioxide based upon the work of John Tyndall, Samuel P. Langley, Knut nsgstrm, and others.

Arrhenius used his model to calculate the change of temperature that would follow if the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was two-thirds, double, or even triple its present value. He reported that a doubling of CO2 would raise global temperatures by about 3 to 3.5 C while a reduction of CO2 by one-third would lower temperatures by roughly the same amount. These values happen to be within the range of current estimates even though Arrhenius ignored the possible effects of changes of horizontal advection and cloud cover and worked with very limited spectroscopic data. For example, the infrared atmospheric window between 8 and 12 microns and the strong carbon dioxide and water vapor absorption bands beyond 12 microns were unknown at the time.

His calculations, made for every tenth parallel of latitude and for every season, showed that ice age conditions could be sustained between 40 and 50 North latitude if the carbon dioxide in the air should sink to about half of its present value. On the other hand, the temperature of the Arctic regions would rise dramatically if the CO2 concentration was double or triple its present value. In general, he wrote, "if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression."

This was in essence a geological model, and the onset of ice ages and interglacials were his primary concern. Ultimately, crustal processess, not the biosphere, controlled CO2 levels and he considered volcanoes, not coal burning, to be the "chief source of carbonic acid for the atmosphere." Over the course of a millennium, however, humans could have a major influence, since he estimated that burning the world's annual production of coal, approximately 500 million tons, produced about one-thousandth of the total atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. "

Must be a conspiracy.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA