Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Skating Christmases
Never in recorded history had England been colder than the winter of 1962-1963.
The Thames froze solid, affording Londoners their third “Skating Christmas” in a
row. In Sussex, by Boxing Day nine inches of snow had piled up, then two more
fell. According to the
Mid Sussex Times
, “1962 went out bleakly and dismally,
leaving a heritage of blizzard havoc, snowbound roads and traffic dislocation to
the infant New Year.”
1
For Sussexman Guy Stewart Callendar, shoveling up the rare white flakes, the
blizzards and low temperatures were a special disappointment: they appeared to
refute his life's most important work. Nature, the ultimate arbiter, seemed to be
disproving Callendar's “CO
2
theory.”
In 1938, Callendar (1898-1964), a British steam engineer and amateur meteor-
ologist, had explained to the august Royal Meteorological Society that by burn-
traps rising heat rays, he said, adding more would be bound to warm the Earth.
During and after World War II, CO
2
levels in the atmosphere did rise as humans
burned more fossil fuel, but global temperature fell. At the end of his 1938 article,
Callendar had estimated that twenty years should provide enough data to test his
theory. On his copy of the article, no doubt wishing he had chosen a longer test
period, next to his twenty-year estimate Callendar later penned an ironic exclama-
tion point.
3
Guy Callendar died in October 1964. In the following decade, temperatures
began to rise and kept on rising. Over the years, scientists assembled a mountain of
evidence that confirmed his theory. Callendar was right about CO
2
, but his timing
was off. As we have seen repeatedly, with the great discoveries of the earth scien-
ces, the timing usually is off.
A Capital Experiment
Baron Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) is usually credited as the first to
recognize what today we call the greenhouse effect. Fourier might have stepped
from the pages of a Dumas novel, wielding not a rapier but penetrating mathem-
atics. But even so great a scientist could not escape the vicissitudes of fame and
