Climate: a viral article 110 years ago

Climate: a viral article 110 years ago

Issued on August 14, 1912 In a New Zealand daily, the short article was titled “Coal consumption affects climate”. It was chronicled by the work of Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who is now considered the first scientist to determine how much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could lead to global warming.

But in this series of posts for an article now 110 years old, one detail has been forgotten: as Scientific article Darinius was 16 years old in 1912, and this New Zealand newspaper wasn’t the first to discover it. According to historian Jeff Nichols,It will, in fact, come from an article in the popular magazine popular mechanics Appeared in April 1912, this same historian found in the American press other examples dating back to the 1890s and 1900.

As for Arrhenius, he was not a pioneer in the whole line. He followed in the footsteps of French physicist Joseph Fourier who in 1824 postulated that seemingly small changes in the composition of the atmosphere could affect the climate. After him, the American Eunice Foot in 1856 and the British John Tyndall in 1859, They will pretend That different gases in the atmosphere absorb heat from the sun differently, to the point that a small increase in some of them can cause global warming. It took until the 1930s before British engineer Guy Callender, who analyzes meteorological data from past decades around the world, became the first to determine the general trend of rising temperatures.

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About the Author: Irene Alves

"Bacon ninja. Guru do álcool. Explorador orgulhoso. Ávido entusiasta da cultura pop."

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