Destructive Criticism - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 212

absorb. “Undoubtedly the aqueous [water] vapor powerfully absorbs the terrestrial
radiation,” wrote the authors. 3 Here was a second reason to reject Arrhenius's the-
ory.
Arrhenius rebutted Ångström's arguments, showing that his theory worked in
spite of the criticisms, but he lost the battle. 4 With the exception of Ekholm, cli-
mate scientists began a fifty-year-long rejection of Arrhenius's theory.
In 1908, the year that Worlds in the Making appeared, the Smithsonian Institu-
tion published Annals of the Astrophysical Observatory . The authors were Charles
Greely Abbot and F. E. Fowle Jr. Even without water vapor, they calculated, CO 2
could absorb only 14 percent of rising heat radiation. “It seems to be certain,” they
wrote, “that the earth's solid and liquid surface, and the lower parts of the atmo-
sphere, contribute directly almost nothing to the amount of radiation which the
earth as a planet sends to space.”
Sir George C. Simpson (1878-1965) was one of the most distinguished meteor-
ologists of the first half of the twentieth century. In a 1929 lecture, he addressed
Arrhenius's theory, spelling out “three reasons why carbon-dioxide can play little
part in altering the temperature of the atmosphere.” First, “the absorption band of
carbon-dioxide is very narrow and can have very little effect on the terrestrial ra-
diation.” Second, there is already “so much carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere that
any further addition will have little or no influence.” Third, “in most parts of the
atmosphere there is so much water vapour that it alone would absorb all the radi-
ation . . . hence the presence or absence of carbon-dioxide can have very little ef-
fect.” 5 In an article in Nature that year, Simpson summed up: “Terrestrial radiation
is not affected by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” 6
In a 1913 article, William Jackson Humphreys (1862-1949) of the U.S. Weather
Service became the first to use the term “greenhouse effect”: “It is true that carbon
dioxide is more absorptive of terrestrial than of solar radiations, and that it there-
fore also produces a greenhouse or blanketing effect.” 7 His influential topic, Phys-
ics of the Air , appeared in 1920 and went through two more editions, the last in
1940. 8 In his 1913 article and in his topic, Humphreys argued that because a small
amount of carbon dioxide was such an effective absorber, and because water vapor
was an even more effective one,
either doubling or halving the amount of carbon dioxide could alter but little the total amount
of radiation actually absorbed by the atmosphere, and, therefore, seemingly, could not appre-
ciably change the average temperature of the earth, or be at all effective in the production of
marked climatic changes.
The carbon dioxide theory has failed utterly under searching criticism. 9