In the late 19th century, scientists were worried that Earth was going to freeze due to the ongoing depletion of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Arrhenius said that doubling or tripling CO2 would prevent an ice age, and bring back the mild temperatures of the tertiary time.
Arrhenius said that the atmosphere had been robbed of CO2 by formation of coal, and that burning coal would more than double the rate of plant growth. Also note that he reported 1:2500 (400 PPM) CO2 in 1910, same as they measure at Mauna Loa today.
Papers Past — North Otago Times — 16 April 1910 — HOW THE BURNING OF COAL VITIATES THE ATMOSPHERE.
Arrhenius spoke in glowing terms of the benefits of increasing CO2.
And then the passengers of this Good Ship Earth will have vast fields of good land, which are not good now
This Tyndall/Arrhenius wisdom will again re-emerge as the Paris talks rightfully collapse when their major calamity, Sea Level Rise based upon CO2 linkage, is shown to be groundless: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4219691/InconvenientCO2.pdf
I hope you’re right, but I’m rather pessimistic these days that the climate Gestapo is going to rollover and play dead anytime soon.
I find all of the “science” surrounding CO2 contradictory.
They tell us the atmosphere is transparent to solar visible radiation but substantially blocks terrestrial IR – yet CO2 & water absorbs the much more powerful solar radiation thus reducing the initial surface heating effect. The back radiation from the atmosphere supposedly heats the already hotter surface ??
The radiation from 99% of the dry atmosphere – N2, O2 and AR – supposedly is not considered significant because these are IR transparent yet this radiation MUST overwhelm the GHGs by 10000:1 for CO2 and many hundreds:1 for water vapour – Planck, Stefan and Boltzmann say so.
If, as many “scientists” claim, N2 and O2 do not radiate IR at all or only insignificantly (and thus they are miracles among all the elements) then they are the real heat trappers because they undoubtedly do heat up and they do cool down yet cannot radiate their accumulated heat to space. If you subscribe to the N2 and O2 do not radiate logic then GHGs are the atmosphere’s coolants and N2 and O2 are the heat traps.
Personally I think the whole “science” surrounding CO2 is a huge waste of money – once they discovered it was plant food they could have vastly increased food production by building green houses where plants can be grown in the best possible atmospheric conditions instead of wasting vast quantities of money paying salaries to people who have been shown to be corrupting science.
Rosco said at 7:43 pm
The back radiation from the atmosphere supposedly heats the already hotter surface ??
No, the sun does the warming, green house gas impedes cooling.
“green house gas impedes cooling”
No it doesn’t.
A study over three decades of observations – findings by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, the federal government agency for scientific research in Australia (CSIRO), in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), found the opposite of the AGW predicted “desertification” is happening – Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world’s arid regions over the past 30 years through a process called CO2 fertilisation
http://phys.org/news/2013-07-greening-co2.html
CO2 is more than just fertilizer, it’s a basic compound in photosynthesis. We are a carbon based life form, and every carbon atom in your body was once CO2 in the atmosphere. The so-called green revolution is in no small way augmented by the increase in CO2 over the past century.
Disillusioned, it’s because the plants don’t have to open their stomata in their leaves as much to get CO2 as they did before, and therefore less water is lost through stomata.
Thanks Steve. The chief researcher’s area of expertise is ecohydrology in relation to vegetation, and did a paper on photosynthesis. He uses the term “C02 fertilisation” http://people.csiro.au/D/R/Randall-Donohue.aspx
It’s amazin’ that we never see these kinds of scientific studies in the news. It’s also amazing that the [faux] consensus climate scientists could have it so backwards – predicting that increases in carbon dioxide would cause “desertification”. It is so bad – they are wrong so much of the time – that if a ‘consensus’ climate scientist says anything at all, one can almost make book reality is the opposite.
Thanks Morgan, for rounding it out, That makes sense.
Oh, so if CO2 driven climate change is real, man-made and happening right now, how is it that slightly wetter, slightly warmer climate is bad? I think if it got a little bit warmer and wetter it would be just fine.
He’s right about CO2 preventing ice ages. 3,000,000 years ago there were no ice ages, and CO2 was double what it is today:
http://www.hyzercreek.com/IceAge5.jpg
Maybe, but likely has more to do with the location of the continents.
This demonstrates that Professor Arrhenius was the reformist Martin Luther of the Climate Religion. I was gonna say Antichrist, but the seventh carbon horn has not yet trumpeted. Luckily he lived in the nascent stages of its genesis. If he spruiked those things now, he’d be RICO’ed faster than you can say Al Capone.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections and commented:
Arrhenius said that doubling or tripling CO2 would prevent an ice age, and bring back the mild temperatures of the tertiary time.