Making Climate Change History

Documents from Global Warming's Past

Joshua P. Howe, Joshua P. Howe

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295741406
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Conservación y Protección del Medio Ambiente

This collection pulls together key documents from the scientific and political history of climate change, including congressional testimony, scientific papers, newspaper editorials, court cases, and international declarations. Far more than just a compendium of source materials, the book uses these documents as a way to think about history, while at the same time using history as a way to approach the politics of climate change from a new perspective. Making Climate Change History provides the necessary background to give readers the opportunity to pose critical questions and create plausible answers to help them understand climate change in its historical context; it also illustrates the relevance of history to building effective strategies for dealing with the climatic challenges of the future.

PART 1

THE SCIENTIFIC “PREHISTORY” OF GLOBAL WARMING

For historians of global warming, the early history of climate science presents a dilemma. On one hand, historians, scientists, and popular authors get significant traction out of a two-hundred-year story of investigations into the greenhouse effect that links an episodic series of scientific firsts into a scientific biography of global warming that reinforces the power of modern scientific consensus with the weight of historical time.¹ It is a useful story in that it demonstrates the impressive and often underappreciated longevity of the issue, and in the tradition of science, it gives credit where historians and scientists believe credit is due for new ideas that burgeoned into our modern understanding of CO₂-induced climate change.

And yet, this story is also deeply problematic. As a story of sequential firsts, the intellectual biography of global warming tends to presume a modern, twenty-first-century understanding of climate change that the story’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century characters by and large did not have. The work of past scientists may seem prescient—we say that they were ahead of their time—but often that prescience is in part an artifact of our own retrospective viewpoint, and it can lead us to misunderstand our historical scientists’ projects by failing to approach them on their own terms.²

Take, for example, John Tyndall’s 1861 “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours.” A prominent Irish physicist, mountaineer, and advocate of secular government widely famous for all three endeavors in the second half of the nineteenth century, Tyndall’s twenty-first-century fame resides in his experimental verification of the greenhouse effect, the tendency of the atmosphere to absorb and reradiate energy from the sun in a way that helps to stabilize the temperature of the earth. Using an instrument called a ratio photospectrometer, Tyndall measured the opacity of a wide variety of gases, and noted the particular importance of carbon dioxide and “aqueous vapour”—water—changes in the concentrations of which, he claimed, “may in fact have produced all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal.” In 2000, the University of East Anglia honored this discovery by naming its new climate research facility the Tyndall Centre.

The story is both true and compelling, and it works well as part of a lineage that also includes Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, the French polymath best known for his mathematical work but also for his recognition in the 1820s that the atmosphere works to redistribute and maintain the temperature of the earth, and Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Nobel Laureate and then recent divorcé whose mathematical calculations of CO₂ doubling set a standard against which climate models would be compared for the next century.³

But there is much more going on in “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours” than this rather simple lineage would suggest, and much of it has to do with a part of the history of climate change that a narrow focus on the greenhouse effect does more to mask than it does to reveal. In particular, Tyndall’s 1861 paper represents an important salvo in an ongoing battle among European scientists over the nature of the laws of thermodynamics—laws without which none of the twentieth- or twenty-first-century debate over CO₂-induced climate change would make much sense. In both his 1861 paper and an 1862 follow-up, Tyndall’s comments on climate are sparse and speculative compared to his discussion of the implications of his experiments for the “dynamical theory of heat,” a theory articulated by Tyndall’s “old scientific antagonist,” William Thomson, which included the conservation of energy (the first law of thermodynamics) and an irreversible “law of dissipation,” or entropy, that Tyndall feared reflected the Presbyterian sentiments of some of its acolytes. Tyndall, a selfdescribed “scientific naturalist” who believed in a mechanistic, reducible universe explicable by the atomic theory of matter and his friend Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, saw in his experiments on gaseous absorption a way to investigate the relationship between energy and atoms. To put it simply, what Tyndall cared about here was heat.

Tyndall’s interest in heat is not surprising if we understand him as a nineteenth-century physicist. The nature of heat was perhaps the most important question in nineteenth-century physics. In fact, Fourier, too, came to his observations about the action of the atmosphere on terrestrial temperatures in a work that was primarily an investigation of the nature of heat. Fourier hoped to be “the Newton of heat,” and he described his commitment to discovering the mathematical laws of heat as a way of understanding the geophysical properties of the earth—a novel idea and a term that would not appear in English until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, when not just physicists but also geologists and chemists like Svante Arrhenius would attempt to apply the laws of their disciplines to the large-scale, long-term phenomena of the entire earth. Thus, while from a twenty-first-century perspective Fourier, Tyndall, and Arrhenius seem important because of their specific contributions to the intellectual biography of global warming, approaching their scientific work with nineteenth-century questions in mind gives us insight into questions about a whole new way of thinking about global processes—questions about geophysics—certainly as meaningful to twentieth- and twenty-first-century climatic concerns as the absorption spectra for which the Tyndall Centre honors its namesake.

If too narrow a focus on the lineage of scientific concepts can lead us astray, how should we approach documents from science’s past that are often famous for their present-day relevance? That is: how does a historian read a scientific paper as a historical document?

One key to understanding scientific papers of the past on their own terms is to think about how scientists, then and now, read papers. While a historian might read a diary entry, a letter, or a piece of literature straight through from beginning to end, scientists often read scientific papers backwards, beginning not with introductory text but with figures and data, the abstract, and the paper’s conclusion. Not all scientists read and write papers this way, but tables, graphs, and visualizations of data often represent the most important portion of a scientific work and reflect the lion’s share of the scientists’ labor, and starting with figures can give a sense of what is important in a scientific paper.

For example, Tyndall put a great deal of thought and work into the instrumentation he used to measure gases in his laboratory. What can the plate at the end of the paper and the explanation of the ratio photospectrometer tell us about the types of questions he hoped to ask and the means by which he asked them? (Can you figure out how the instrument actually worked?) Like many twenty-first-century scientists, Tyndall may have expected his scientific readers to focus on his figures and his concluding section, engaging with the body of the text only to find more information about experimental design and subordinate points of interest. What points of interest come out in the text, and how? For example, compare Tyndall’s short line about CO₂ and climate change (buried on page 28 of the paper) with his conclusion (excerpted from the three full pages of commentary), “On the Physical Connexion between Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction.” How are the two parts of the paper different, and what purposes do they serve for the author? Compare these, in turn, with the way Svante Arrhenius broaches the subject of the influence of “carbonic acid in the air” on temperatures on the ground, and the way G. S. Callendar introduces climate change in his much more familiar 1938 paper, “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature.” Beyond the citations, what subjects and ideas recognizably carry from one to the next, and what changes?

For modern historians, taking historical scientists on their own terms requires that we put the questions that pique our interest—in this case, Tyndall’s discussion of CO₂ and water vapor—in conversation with the primary interests of scientists themselves. To mistake their historical concerns for our own is to miss the extent to which the nineteenth-century study of climate change provided not just a specific set of experiments illuminating the greenhouse effect, but rather a whole system of knowledge about how the world works that was—and still is—essential to making the greenhouse effect meaningful.

NOTES

1 Gale E. Christianson, Greenhouse: The 200-Year Story of Global Warming (New York: Walker, 1999); James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

2 For a more detailed analysis of the problem of taking nineteenth-century climate science on its own terms, see Joshua P. Howe, “Getting Past the Greenhouse: John Tyndall and the Nineteenth-Century History of Climate Change,” in The Age of Scientific Naturalism: John Tyndall and His Contemporaries, ed. Bernard Lightman and Michael Reidy (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014).

3 See James R. Fleming, “Joseph Fourier, the ‘Greenhouse Effect,’ and the Quest for a Universal Theory of Terrestrial Temperatures,” Endeavour 23, no. 2 (1999); James R. Fleming, “Joseph Fourier’s Theory of Terrestrial Temperatures,” in Historical Perspectives, 55–64.

JOSEPH FOURIER

GENERAL REMARKS ON THE TEMPERATURES OF THE GLOBE AND THE PLANETARY SPACES

One of the more colorful characters in the history of nineteenth-century science, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier is often credited with the first usage of the greenhouse analogy in describing the way the atmosphere absorbs and redistributes heat. Fourier was many things—at various points he worked as mathematician at the famous École Polytechnique, served as prefect of Isère and Rhône, acted as special adviser to Napoleon in Egypt, and spent time as a political prisoner of both the revolutionary and reactionary governments of the French Revolution (both times for being a lukewarm revolutionary). He was not, however, a prophet of climate change, and in fact Fourier was only marginally concerned with what we now call the greenhouse effect. His discussion of the earth’s climate fit into a larger project to articulate the action of heat in mathematical terms. His description here of Henri de Saussure’s experiments with the heliothermometer—which he likened in French to une serre, or a greenhouse—reveal a nascent understanding of the way the earth absorbs and reradiates heat at different wavelengths, which is in fact quite important to understanding the earth’s energy budget. (Fourier’s “non-luminous radiating heat” is familiar to modern scientists as infrared radiation). But the phenomenon he hoped to explore was different from the mechanism by which the atmosphere warms the globe, and the specific “greenhouse” reference may thus be a red herring that distracts us from a much larger contribution to a broader scientific development, the advent of what he called geophysics, which opened the door to the science of climate change in the twentieth century.*

The question of terrestrial temperature, one of the most remarkable and difficult in natural philosophy, involves very different elements which require to be considered in a general light. I have thought it would be useful to have condensed in a single essay, all the results of this theory. The analytical details here admitted, are found in works which I have already published. I was specially desirous of presenting to philosophers, in a concise table, a complete view of the phenomena and the mathematical relations which exist between them.

The heat of the earth is derived from three sources, which should first be distinctly mentioned.

1. The earth is heated by the solar rays; the unequal distribution of which causes diversities of climate.

2. It partakes of the common temperature of the planetary spaces; being exposed to the radiations from the innumerable stars which surround the solar system.

3. The earth preserves in its interior a part of that primitive heat which it had at the time of the first formation of the planets.

We shall separately examine each of these three causes, and the phenomena which they produce. We will show, as clearly as we are able in the present state of the science, the principal features of these phenomena. For the purpose of giving a general idea of this great question, and showing at a glance the results of our researches, we present them in the following summary, which is in some measure a synoptic table of the contents of this article, and of several which have preceded it.

The solar system is situated in a region of the universe, every point of which has a common and constant temperature, determined by the rays of light and heat which proceed from the surrounding stars. This low temperature of the planetary space, is a little below that of the polar regions of the earth. The earth would have only the same temperature with the heavens, were it not for two causes which are concurring to heat it. One is the internal heat which it possessed at its formation, a part of which only is dissipated through the surface; the other is the continued action of the solar rays, which penetrate the whole mass, and produce at the surface, the diversities of climate….

We can determine with some degree of precision, the temperature which the earth would have acquired if situated in the place of each of the planets; but the temperature of the planets themselves, cannot be ascertained; for in order to that we must know the state of the surface and the atmosphere.… The motion of the air and waters, the extent of the seas, the elevation and form of the surface, the effects of human industry and all the accidental changes of the earth’s surface, modify the temperatures of each climate….

The motion of the waters and of the air, tends to modify the effects of heat and cold.

It renders their distribution more uniform, but it would be impossible for the atmosphere to supply the place of that universal cause which supports the common temperature of the planetary spaces; and if this cause did not exist, we should observe, notwithstanding the atmosphere and seas, an enormous difference between the temperatures of the equatorial and polar regions.

It is difficult to know how far the atmosphere influences the mean temperature of the globe; and in this examination we are no longer guided by a regular mathematical theory. It is to the celebrated traveller, M. de Saussure, that we are indebted for a capital experiment, which appears to throw some light on this question.

The experiment consists in exposing to the rays of the sun, a vessel covered with one or more plates of glass, very transparent, and placed at some distance one above the other. The interior of the vessel is furnished with a thick covering of black cork, proper for receiving and preserving heat. The heated air is contained in all parts, both in the interior of the vessel and in the spaces between the plates. Thermometers placed in the vessel itself and in the intervals above, mark the degree of heat in each space. This instrument was placed in the sun about noon, and the thermometer in the vessel was seen to rise to 70°, 80°, 100°, 110°, (Reaumur,) and upwards. The thermometers placed in the intervals between the glass plates indicated much lower degrees of heat, and the heat decreased from the bottom of the vessel to the highest interval.

The effect of solar heat upon air confined within transparent coverings, has long since been observed. The object of the apparatus we have just described, is to carry the acquired heat to its maximum; and especially to compare the effect of the solar ray upon very high mou...