It is now a century since Syante Arrhenius published the idea: As human activity puts ever more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global warming becomes ever more likely. (See figure 1 and the box on page 36.) His paper attracted notice, and one might suppose that knowledge of the so‐called “greenhouse effect” has grown steadily ever since. But that is not in fact how the science proceeded. During more than half a century after 1896 almost nothing of value was learned about global warming. Only in the late 1950s did scientists at last begin to regard it as a serious possibility, indeed a potential danger.
REFERENCES
1.
For an annotated bibliography on the greenhouse effect and climatic change, see
M. D.
Handel
, J. S.
Risbey
, Climatic Change
21
, 97
(1992
).For brief histories, see
W. W.
Kellogg
, Climatic Change
10
, 113
(1987
);M. D. H.
Jones
, A.
Henderson‐Sellers
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14
, 1
(1990
).For more on Arrhenius, see E. Crawford, Arrhenius: From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse Effect, Science History Publications, Canton, Mass. (1996), ch. 10.
2.
R. Carson, Popular Science, November 1951, p. 114. Time, 2 January 1939, p. 27.
For an example of analysis, see
G. S.
Callendar
, Qtly. J. Roy. Meteorological Soc.
64
, 223
(1938
). 3.
A. Abarbanel, T. McCluskey, Saturday Evening Post, 1 July 1950, p. 22; Time, 2 January 1939, p. 27.
4.
T. A. Blair, Climatology, General and Regional, Prentice‐Hall, New York (1942), p. 101; see also p. 90.
5.
G. S. Callendar in ref. 2.
6.
A. J. Lotka, Elements of Physical Biology, Williams&Williams, Baltimore (1924),
reprinted as Elements of Mathematical Biology, Dover, New York (1956), p. 222.
7.
A. J. Lotka in ref. 6. For a discussion and references on technological optimism, see S. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images, Harvard U.P., Cambridge, Mass. (1988), esp. chapters 1 and 8.
8.
C. E. P. Brooks, in Compendium of Meteorology, T. F. Malone, ed., American Meteorological Society, Boston (1951), p. 1004.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
H. Craig, ref. 12.
14.
Quotes from R. Revelle and H. E. Suess in ref. 13.
15.
Revelle‐Suess submission, 28 August 1956, folder 63, box 28, Revelle Papers MC6, Scripps Oceanographic Institute Archives, La Jolla, Calif. Communication from James Arnold to James Anderson, 8 January 1958, box 1, folder 11, Arnold Papers MSS 112, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego. B. Bolin, E. Eriksson, in The Atmosphere and the Sea in Motion: Scientific Contributions to the Rossby Memorial Volume, B. Bolin, ed., Rockefeller Institute P. and Oxford U.P., New York (1959), p. 130.
16.
G. N. Plass, Sci. Am., July 1959, p. 41.
17.
Roger Revelle, oral history interview by Earl Droessler, 1989,
American Institute of Physics Niels Bohr Library, College Park,
Md. C. D.
Keeling
, Tellus
12
, 200
(1960
).C. D. Keeling, in Mauna Loa Observatory: A 20th Anniversary Report, J. Miller, ed., National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration special report, NOAA Environmental Research Laboratories, Boulder, Colo. (September 1978), p. 36.
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