The Origins of Climate Change
Svante Arrhenius: Quantifying the contribution of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
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Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 - 2 October 1927) was born on his ancestor’s farm estate in Vik, Sweden. When he was one year old, his family moved to Uppsala where his father was working as a land surveyor for the University of Uppsala. Interested in mathematics from an early age, Svante studied at the Katedralskolan (The Cathedral School), one of the oldest institutions in Sweden, and in 1876, he entered the University of Uppsala to study mathematics, chemistry and physics.
Electrolytic Theory of Dissociation
After completing his degree, he went to Stockholm to work under Professor Erik Edlund, whose research was concentrated on the theory of electricity and the electromotive forces generated when two different metals are put in contact. But the interests of young Arrhenius lay elsewhere and soon moved to a new research area, into the movement of electric current through solutions and the conductivities of electrolytic solutions. Arrhenius attributed the causes of chemical phenomena to electrically charged particles or ions, which carried electric charges even when there was no current flowing through the solution. These ions could, therefore, transmit an electric current. Arrhenius based his theory on the work of Berzelius, a chemist, who is considered one of the founders of modern chemistry, and who, early in the 19th century had arrived at the conclusion that the relationship between electrical and chemical phenomena was one of cause and effect.[1] But Berzelius’s work had been largely forgotten and Arrhenius’ new way of approaching the study of electrolytes was considered a bit too revolutionary by the chemists of the time. When in 1884, Arrhenius presented his Ph.D. thesis, titled ‘Investigations on the galvanic conductivity of electrolytes,’ his examiners were not impressed. He was awarded the lowest possible grade. They couldn’t possibly imagine that almost twenty years later, in 1903, Arrhenius would win the third Nobel prize for his work in electrolytic theory of dissociation. [2]
However, in 1884, Arrhenius’s academic prospects were limited. He was awarded a travel stipend by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and for the next six years, he visited several European institutions, doing postdoctoral research. He studied with Wilhelm Ostwald in Riga and with Friedrich Kohlrausch in Würzburg. He then moved to Graz to work with Ludwig Boltzmann and with Henry van ‘t Hoff (he won the first Nobel in Chemistry), in Amsterdam. Convinced of the correctness of his electrolytic theory of dissociation, Arrhenius shared his ideas with receptive scientists and gradually won followers. Finally, in 1891, he was offered a position as a lecturer at the University of Stockholm.
Quantifying the contribution of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
Sofia Rudbeck was one of the first women in Sweden to obtain a doctorate in science and the first woman admitted to the Swedish Geological Society. She was also one of Arrhenius’ first female students. They married in Uppsala in 1894 but their marriage lasted only two years. The breakdown of his marriage in 1896, would be tied in with a breakthrough in the science of climate change.
In April 1896, Svante Arrhenius published an article titled On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, where he presented the first model of the influence of carbonic acid (CO2) in the air on the temperature in the surface of the Earth. [3] The main question that Arrhenius sought to answer in his article was: “Is the mean temperature of the ground in any way influenced by the presence of heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere?” He cited Tyndall, whom Arrhenius had come to recognize as “the enormous importance” of “the influence of the absorption of the atmosphere upon the climate,” as well as, Claude Pouillet, who investigated the role of carbon dioxide in trapping heat, and Fourier, who maintained that the atmosphere acts like a hothouse because it lets through the rays of the sun (chaleur lumineuse) but retains the dark rays (chaleur obscure) of the ground. Arrhenius also draws heavily on the work of his colleague, Professor Arvid G. Högbom, a geologist, to whom he gives due credit. Högbom 's work was mainly concerned with pre-Cambrian and igneous rocks, ores, glacial, and geomorphological problems.
Svante Arrhenius was the first to use a model to quantify the contribution of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Compared to modern climate models, which are enormously complex, Arrhenius’ model was too simple. He also had to make some simplifying assumptions with regard to some elements of the climate system, which today we would consider crucial—clouds and atmospheric or oceanic circulations, for example. [4] But Arrhenius’ grasp of the essentials of atmospheric radiative transfer was impressive and his model allowed him to predict the variations in temperature which would result from variations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Arrhenius argued that such variations in temperature variations of atmospheric CO2 concentrations could have an effect on the heat budget and the surface temperature of the planet and might explain the climatic changes in geological times, especially the Ice Ages. In his study, Arrhenius also included the effects of other processes, such as the strong wavelength dependence of the absorption of water vapour and carbon dioxide.
After an estimated 10,000 to 100,000 calculations by hand, Arrhenius predicted a rise of 5oC to 6oC for a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In his words, “if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.” In plain English, this means that if we double the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, the temperature will increase by a set number of degrees.
Arrhenius predicted that a doubling of CO2 due to fossil fuels burning alone would take 500 years and would lead to temperature increases of about 4 degrees Celsius. This prediction was based on the industrial activity of his time; he couldn’t possibly guess the wild increase of human activity in the twentieth century.
Arrhenius’ ideas had not been accepted easily by his peers in the Physics Society. Even Högbom, who had been open to the idea of CO2, as the cause of geological climatic change, now sided with those who thought this cause lay in changes in the position of the poles on the earth’s surface.
Arrhenius also suggested that an increase in the quantity of CO2 will diminish the difference in temperature between day and night and that any significant and prolonged alteration of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere could trigger major climatic changes. But he was not overly concerned. On the contrary, he was rather optimistic and he had a deep-rooted belief in humanity. He estimated that it would take another three millennia of burning fossil fuels for the amount of atmospheric CO2 to double. In his 1908 book “Worlds of the Making: The Evolution of the Universe,” he writes: “By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the Earth, ages when the Earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.”
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References
Svante Arrhenius, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, (The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, 5th series, April 1896)
S. Arrhenius, Worlds in the Making: The evolution of the Universe, (New York: Harper and Harper, 1908)
Crawford, E. (1998). Arrhenius '1996 model of the Greenhouse Effect in Context. In H. Rodhe, C. Robert, & C. Elisabeth, The Legacy of Svante Arrhenius: Understanding the Greenhouse effect. 276: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Slingo, A. (1998). Assessing the Treatment of Radiation in Climate Models. In H. Rodhe, & C. Robert, The Legacy of Svante Arrhenius: Understanding the Greenhouse Effect. Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Notes
[1] In Sweden, Berzelius Day is celebrated on 20 August in honour of him.
[2] Faraday had worked out two laws describing electrolysis. 1) The amount of chemical change during electrolysis is proportional to the charge passed. 2) The charge required to deposit or liberate a mass m is given by Q = Fmz/M, where F is the Faraday constant, z is the charge of the ion, and M is the relative ionic mass. Faraday had spoken of "ions" (Greek- wanderer) as charged particles that carried electricity through solutions However, in the late 19th century, the nature of ions remained unclear. From his results, Arrhenius concluded that electrolytes, when dissolved in water, become to varying degrees split or dissociated into electrically opposite positive and negative ions. The degree to which this dissociation occurred depended above all on the nature of the substance and its concentration in the solution – being more developed the greater the dilution. The ions were supposed to be the carriers of the electric current, e.g. in electrolysis, but also of the chemical activity. The relation between the actual number of ions and their number at great dilution (when all the molecules were dissociated) gave a quantity of special interest (“activity constant”). Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1903/arrhenius/biographical/
[3] As it was common back then, the paper was written in English and German, the two major scientific languages of his time. The German article, titled Ueber den Einfluss des Atmosphärischen Kohlensäurengehalts auf die Temperatur der Erdoberfläche, was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm, (Arrhenius, Ueber den Einfluss des Atmosphärischen Kohlensäurengehalts auf die Temperatur der Erdoberfläche, 1896)
[4] Nowadays, modern climate models are enormously more complex and are used in ambitious programs for analysing and predicting climate change.