Destructive Criticism - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 214

Arrhenius and Chamberlin saw in [the variation in atmospheric CO 2 concentration] a cause of
climatic changes, but the theory was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was
found that all the long-wave radiation absorbed by CO 2 is also absorbed by water vapour.
This theory is not considered further. 16
In a 1956 article in the popular magazine Weatherwise , Hans Panofsky
(1918-1988) of Pennsylvania State University reviewed the different “Theories of
Climate Change.” 17 He classified them under the headings (1) Earth's Crust: shifts
in the position of the poles and mountain building; (2) Atmospheric: CO2 vari-
ations; and (3) Astronomical: changes in the Sun's intensity or the Earth's orbit. 18
Panofsky noted Ångström's then fifty-year-old argument that carbon dioxide is
such a good absorber that, as Panofsky put it, adding more would not have “much
effect on the temperature of the atmosphere.” He repeated another and, as it turns
out, more worthy concern that Arrhenius and others had voiced: “The ocean con-
tains fifty times as much carbon dioxide as the atmosphere, and it is difficult to see
why any loss of the gas in the atmosphere would not be made up almost immedi-
ately by carbon dioxide from the water.” 19
Sixdecades afterArrhenius's1896paper,theCO 2 theoryappeared tobebeyond
resurrection, an idea that no respectable meteorologist could endorse. But the ma-
gisters of meteorology had overlooked two important papers, and others were
about to arrive.
Bare Rock in Space
In a 1931 paper in Physical Review , the physicist E. O. Hulburt, first director of
the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, calculated the Earth's average surface tem-
perature using an equation that expressed Pouillet's requirement that the Earth and
any object in space must lose as much heat as it gains. 20 On one side of Hulburt's
equals sign was the expression for the heat lost by an object without an atmo-
sphere—a “bare rock in space.” As noted earlier, such a body loses heat as the
fourth power of its temperature: T 4 , encapsulated in the Stefan-Boltzman law. Of
course, the Earth is notabare rock, butthis was Hulburt'ssimplified starting point.
On the other side of the equation was the expression for the solar constant: the
amount of solar energy striking the Earth's surface per unit area, which by 1931
was accurately known. Since the Earth is in heat balance, so must Hulburt's equa-
tion balance. Solving for temperature, he found that if the Earth were the bare rock
in space, its average surface temperature would be −21.5°C. But the measured av-
erage surface temperature is +14°C. The presence of the atmosphere thus warms
the globe by about 35°C.