Warming Predicted For Over a Century

• Pages: 22-23

Page 22 ❧ THE ENVIRONMENTAL FORUM Copyright © 2011, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.

Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, Sept./Oct. 2011

noTice & commenT

of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

each year.” An article in New Scientist

warns that the International Energy

Agency has stated that such emission

levels could cause a warming of more

than 2° Celsius.

Given the rancor of the climate de-

bate today, it’s hard to realize for

how long we have known about the

problem. In the November 1960 issue

of Technology Review, science journalist

Robert C. Cowen warned “we are per-

forming a carbon-dioxide experiment

Warming Predicted

For Over a Century

When did society start to worry

about global warming? Some

date it to James Hansen’s congressio-

nal testimony in 1988, others to the

adoption of the climate convention

in 1992. We have known about the

ability of various gases to trap heat for

more than a hundred years, however.

In fact, in 1896, the Swedish scientist

Svante Arrhenius wrote, “Any doubling

of the percentage of carbon dioxide in

the air would raise the temperature of

the ear th’s surface by 4° Celsius.” is

is remarkably close to the predictions of

current climate models. Scientif‌ic Amer-

ican took note of his f‌indings in 1911,

calling them “ingenious.”

Only recently have some scien-

tists challenged the notion. Critics

of abatement measures feel that the

models used to predict global warm-

ing don’t account for feedback loops

that might mitigate its ef‌fects. But

they must realize that we are play-

ing with our planetary atmosphere,

changing the composition of the

gases that are vital to our well being.

It’s hard to understand how anybody

can not worry about such an uncon-

trolled experiment.

When I studied astrophysics at

Princeton — so long ago that we used

slide rules, not calculators — we were

called upon to predict the surface tem-

perature of planets given the radiation

level of its star and its bolometric al-

bedo, or surface ref‌lectivity, plus some

basic facts about its atmosphere.

Earth’s atmosphere is almost entirely

made up of nitrogen (80 percent) and

oxygen (20 percent), plus trace gases

that include all the greenhouse gases.

Before the industrial revolution, carbon

dioxide constituted .028 percent of

the atmosphere. When we f‌irst started

measuring the gas on an ongoing basis,

in the 1950s, that number had risen to

.032 percent. Today it’s almost .039 per-

cent. I still have my slide rule but don’t

remember the necessary calculations;

however, any notion of the precaution-

ary principle would cause humanity to

take note.

In a recent article in Atlantic, the

climate scientist Michael Mann — he

of the famous “hockey stick” graph of

temperatures during the last millenni-

um, showing a sharp uptick in the last

f‌ifty years — wrote, “We know the last

time CO2 was sustained at this level,

much of the Greenland and West Ant-

arctic ice sheets were not there.” e

article notes that “all human activity

together puts roughly 37 billion tons

“Until the Japanese

catastrophe . . . the biggest

nuclear mess in the Western

world could be found at the

Hanford nuclear facility

in Washington state, where

America’s government once

made most of the plutonium

for its nuclear weapons. More

than two decades after the

cleanup began, of‌f‌icials have

yet to deal with any of the

nasty stuf‌f. ”

— The Economist

his home on Grand Lake

early last week.

“That night, Monday

night, I was just deathly

sick,” Inhofe told the

Tulsa World newspaper

about the respiratory ill-

ness he contracted.

Inhofe had reportedly

asked his 13-year-old

granddaughter to join

him for a swim, but she

demurred. . . .

Ofcials in the Soon-

er State have issued

Senator James Inhofe

(R-Oklahoma) joked

last week that he was

“attacked by the envi-

ronment” following an

illness he believes was

caused by [a] toxic al-

gae bloom.

The 76-year-old rank-

ing member of the En-

vironment and Public

Works Committee, a

frequent critic of envi-

ronmentalists, fell ill

after taking a dip near

multiple warnings about

the blooms of blue-green

algae formally known

as cyanobacteria. The

blooms have been linked

to illnesses around the

world. . . .

The Republican joked

about some possible re-

sponses to his illness

with the Tulsa paper

saying, “The environ-

ment strikes back” or

“Inhofe is attacked by

the environment. . . .”

Inhofe, who has fa-

mously called climate

change “the greatest

hoax ever perpetrated

on the American peo-

ple,” was forced by his

illness to cancel an ap-

pearance last week at

the sixth Heartland In-

stitute Conference on

Climate — a gathering

of climate science skep-

tics in Washington.

— Environment &

Energy Daily

e Senator Is a Little Green Around the Gills