Nils Ekholm – The Influence of Man on Climate
Nils Gustaf Ekholm, meteorologist and physicist (9 October 1848 – 5 April 1923), was born in Smedjebacken, a rural small Swedish town. He studied physics at Norrköping in 1868 and later at the University of Uppsala, where he completed a Master of Science degree in 1876. The same year, he took the position of amanuensis (assistant) at the meteorological observatory in Uppsala.
A few years later, in 1881, Ekholm left the meteorological observatory to lead the meteorological research expedition in Spitsbergen (now known as Svalbard), replacing Commander Malmberg, who, due to an illness, could not lead the research team. The expedition was part of an international effort to perform meteorological and geophysical observations in the Artic over a time period of thirteen months (from 1 August 1882 until 1 September 1883). Eleven countries took part in what later called the First International Polar Year (IPY), and the exception of the Dutch expedition, whose ship became stuck in the ice of the Kara Sea, all the expeditions established stations, twelve in the Arctic and two in the Southern Hemisphere (Tierra del Fuego and Royal Bay, South Georgia). [1]
Polar Station in Sodankylä (1894) Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
_p252_Polar_Station_in_Sodankyl%C3%A4.jpg){kind=link}
After two unsuccessful attempts, in the summer of 1882, the Swedish expedition, finally managed to reach Cape Thorelsen, an ice fiord, in southwest Spitsbergen, and erect its observatory research station. The scientists conducted experiments and collected data on earth’s and water temperatures, wind, and humidity, and observed other astronomical and meteorological phenomena. They observed Earth’s magnetic field and they were able to photograph, and collect information on the nature of northern lights. Besides bringing back valuable scientific data, the Polar Year expedition proved that man could function in the harsh arctic climate, and more importantly, it demonstrated that countries could cooperate and organise ambitious international scientific projects on a large scale. The most significant legacy of the 1882 IPY was the second International Polar Year, held in 1932-33, fifty years after the first one.
The end of the Polar Expedition found Nils Ekholm back at the University in Uppsala, studying for his doctorate. In 1885, he published his first scientific paper, titled Measurements of the Heights and Movements of Clouds, based on the measurements made in the summer of 1883 at Cape Thorelsen. The paper was translated in English and published in the scientific journal Nature on 15 September 1887. In 1889, Ekholm rewarded his Ph.D. and started working for the Central Bureau of Meteorology in Stockholm.
Andrée's Arctic Balloon Expedition of 1897
In the second half of the 19th century, the Arctic was considering a remote and obscure region. The journey, in the face of the brutal Arctic conditions, was gruesome, and a lot of things could go wrong. In 1845, the British Royal Navy carried out an ambitious, and unsuccessful, expedition in the Arctic. The two vessels, HMS Terror and HMS Erebus trapped in sea-ice near King William Island in the Victoria Strait. The crews faced freezing temperatures and little hope for rescue. They all died, from the cold and from starvation.
Between 1886 and 1897, the American Rear Admiral Robert Edwin Peary Sr. led five expeditions to Greenland and Arctic Canada. Eventually, in his final expedition, Peary with his partner Matthew Henson, an African American sailor, and their team, reached to the North Pole on 6 April, 1909, or, at least they believed they were in the North Pole. When a few months later, they emerged from the Arctic, they discovered that another American explorer, Frederick A. Cook, also claimed to have reached to North Pole. Who has been first in the North Pole, had been a matter of controversy and debate for a very long time. [2]
But in the 1890s, the race to reach the North Pole was still open, and the Arctic remained an elusive place, unreachable from both sea or land. It was then that a Swedish engineer and futuristic, named Salomon August Andrée, had a radical idea. He thought, as attempts to reach the North Pole by ship and sledge failed, why not fly over there with a hydrogen balloon?
During the late 1800s, balloons were being used for years and could stay afloat for about 15 days on a stretch. Andrée believed that he would be able to prolong that period and reach the pole. He bought a balloon and from 1893 to 1896, he invented and tried new devises and techniques that could allow his balloon to travel for about 30 days. In the meantime, he was giving lectures, assuring everyone who was willing to hear, that it would be possible to steer a hydrogen-filled balloon across the Arctic and over the North Pole. His venture captured the imagination of the country and many scientists and engineers volunteered to take part in it. Others, including the King Oscar II and Alfred Nobel, provided financial support.
Nils Ekholm was one of the participants in Andrée’s North Pole expedition. The other one was the student Nils Strindberg, who was also a skilled photographer. The team had to overcome many technical obstacles to overcome, one of them was the leakage of the gas from the balloon. It was quite significant, because according to their tests it would reduce the balloon’s ability to stay over airborne for 30 days, the period they needed to travel from Spitsbergen, an island of the Svalbard archipelago, to the Pole. Ekholm had concerns that the balloon wouldn’t have enough hydrogen to stay afloat through the entire trip. He argued with Andrée, and eventually, withdraw his participation. He was replaced by Knut Fraenkel, a 37-year-old engineer. The team of three set sail on 11 July,1897
Just after their take off the balloon lost its steering capabilities when some of the drag ropes, that would slow down the balloon’s vertical or horizontal speed, fell from the basket. After about 50 hours of bumpy ride, they crashed. The crew marched toward Spitsbergen, hoping to go as far as possible before the frigid winter raked them. Food was plentiful; they shot and ate walruses, and polar bears, but they didn’t manage to escape the frigid Arctic winter. We don’t know what happened, but by the beginning of October, they were all dead.
Photo of the fallen balloon taken by Nils Strindberg. (Wikimedia Commons)
In 1930, the Norwegian Bratvaag expedition found the remains of the crew of the balloon, on the island of Kvitøya, in the Svalbard archipelago. They also found Andrée’s journal and Strindberg photographic films describing their flight, the crash and their efforts to stay alive. [3]
The Influence of Man on Climate
Nils Ekholm maintained his interest in ballooning, becoming the founding chairman of the Swedish Aeronautical Society in 1900. He continued to work in the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute in Stockholm, and publish scientific papers – including two papers with Svante Arrhenius on the lunar influences on atmospheric electricity [4] and a paper on the Coriolis force. [5]
Nils Gustaf Ekholm in the 1890s, at the time of the S. A. Andrée expedition. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=653780
In 1901, Nils Ekholm published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, a visionary paper, titled, On the Variations of the Climate of the Geological and Historical Past and their Causes, where he examined the causes of changes in the Earth’s temperature over geological and historical time scales. The paper considers many questions. From the duration of life on Earth to the causes of the great climatic variations during geological ages and to the influence of orbital forcing and the variations of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere upon the climate.
Ekholm indicates that we should expect that variations of the quantity of carbonic acid in the atmosphere will occur and will cause climatic variations of the same kind as those revealed by geological science.’ Although he maintained that a ‘future Ice Age might possible occur,’ as predicted by James Croll’s theory[6], he suggested that that there is an agent that could ‘efficaciously regulate the future climate and consequently prevent the arrival of a new Ice Age’. He wrote:
“… here we find a remarkable circumstance that has hitherto been unexampled in the history of the earth. This is the influence of Man on climate.
In fact, we have seen that the present burning of pit-coal is so great that in one year it gives back to the atmosphere about 1/1000 of its present store of carbonic acid. If this continues for some thousand years, it- will undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of the earth. Also, Man will no doubt be able to increase the supply of carbonic acid also by digging of deep fountains pouring out carbonic acid.”
Ekholm discuss and finally disposes of, two of the terms in Fourier’s old heat budget: the contributions of heat from the Earth’s interior and from the “temperature of space.” He argues that measurements showed the inner heat of the planet could not raise either the mean temperature of the ocean or that of the earth. Also, he argues, the heat radiation of space is so low that does not have a significant contribution to Earth’s heat budget. Earth’s surface energy input is nearly all due to solar radiation.
In his paper, Ekholm also answers Knut Ångström's 1900 conclusion that carbon dioxide absorption was saturated, and therefore could not affect Earth’s climate. Ångström was wrong. His erroneous conclusion was based on an experiment which was simply too inaccurate and it was rooted in an idea of the atmosphere as a single layer. [7] Ekholm writes:
“. . . radiation from the earth into space does not go directly from the ground, but on the average from a layer of the atmosphere having a considerable height above sea-level. The height of that layer depends on the thermal quality of the atmosphere, and it will vary with that quality. The greater is the absorbing power of the air for heat rays emitted from the ground, the higher will that layer be. But the higher the layer, the lower is its temperature relatively to the ground; and as the radiation from the layer into space is the less the lower its temperature is, it follows that the ground will be hotter the higher the radiating layer is.”
Unfortunately, most of the scientists at the time embraced Ångström’s conclusion, and Ekholm’s formulation was overlooked. It would have to wait until 1931, when the physicist E.O. Hulburt disproved Ångström’s findings and demonstrated that “doubling or halving the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changes to by 4°C” rise or fall of surface temperatures.” But the first substantial media coverage of human-driven global warming happened later in the late 1950s when Gilbert Plass published a series of papers on radiative transfer and the role of carbon dioxide. [8]
Notes
[1] The eleven nations that took part in the initiative are: USA, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Finland, France, Holland, Norway, Austria, Russia and Sweden. The Americans, Russians and Germans each fitted out two expeditions or stations, but it was only the Germans who maintained a station in the southern hemisphere. (South Georgia) (Krause, 2010)
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Edwin-Peary
[2] The controversy over the North Pole began in September 1909, when Admiral Peary and Dr. Cook, who had been a surgeon on the 1891-1892 Peary expedition, returned from the Arctic within five days of one another and each man claimed he had reached the North Pole. Admiral Peary said he, accompanied by two Eskimos and his assistant, Matthew Henson, attained the pole on April 6, 1909. Dr. Cook, whose message got out to the world days before his rival's, claimed he had reached the goal with two Eskimo companions almost a year earlier, on April 21, 1908. (Bryce, 1997)
[3] Ice Balloon: Doomed Arctic expedition to the north pole - BBC News
[4] Nils Gustaf Ekholm, and Arrhenius (Svante August), Ueber den Einfluss des Mondes auf den elektrischen Zustand der Erde, etc., 1894
[5] Über die einwirkung der ablenkenden kraft der erdrotation auf die luftbewegung, 1890
[6] James Croll (1821–1890) was a remarkable man. He was a Scottish shelf-educated scientist who made major, although still largely unrecognised, contributions to the theory of the effects of variations in the Earth's orbit on the global climate. He predicted multiple ice ages and that the last one should have ended about 80,000 years ago. Croll's work was widely discussed, but by the end of the 19th century, his theory was generally disbelieved. However, the basic idea of orbitally-forced insolation variations influencing terrestrial temperatures was further developed by Milan Milankovitch and eventually, in modified form, triumphed in 1976.
[7] Earth’s atmosphere is divided into five layers Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere, Thermosphere, and Exosphere.
[8] Gilbert Glass also published a piece in Scientific American, in 1959, titled Carbon Dioxide and Climate. The piece, which was reprinted in 2008, raises an interesting question: How do Man's activities influence the climate of the future?"
Bibliography
Taylor, C. J. (1981). First International Polar Year, 1882-83.” Arctic 34, no. 4 (1981): 370–76. Arctic, 34(4), 370-76. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40509211.
Geography and Travels. (1883). The American Naturalist, 17(2), 185-189. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2449537.
Krause, R. A. (2010). International Polar Year 1882-1883 - the digitized meteorological data legacy. Retrieved from World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, PANGAEA: https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.761657
Bryce, R. M. (1997). Cook and Peary: The Polar Controversy, Resolved. Stackpole Books.
Ekholm, N. (1901). On the Variations of the Climate of the Geological and Historical Past and their Causes. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 27(117), 1-61. doi: 10.1002/qj.49702711702