Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
would be re
ected by the darker ground itself, and that
would decrease the temperature. There are many more
feedback loops, and getting them all correct is the main
effort of today
'
s climate modelers.
colleague, Arvid Hogbom, was interested in
the entire planetary carbon cycle: where carbon came
from and where it went. He thought that human activity,
mainly the use of fossil fuels (back then it was chie
Arrhenius
'
y
coal), was adding to the CO
in the atmosphere. Hogbom
and Arrhenius estimated that human activity at that time
was increasing CO
concentration by a small amount per
year (the
first estimate was made by Hogbom sometime
around
). At the rate it was increasing then, it would
have taken a thousand years to double the level, which did
not seem enough to worry about. They did not conceive
of the enormous increase in human economic activity that
would come with a booming population and a burgeoning
world economy. The amount of CO
being added to the
atmosphere each year has increased dramatically and the
corresponding time to double its concentration has
dropped equally dramatically. After Arrhenius, human-
induced climate change disappeared from the main scien-
ti
c radar screen for reasons that are not clear, but prob-
ably stemmed from the belief that change was very slow.
While some still wrote about it during the subsequent
years, they were generally ignored.
.
Climate Change Goes Big Time
Carbon dioxide and climate change reappeared with a
vengeance when Charles David Keeling of the Scripps
Institute of Oceanography (he had been recruited by
