
First Paper to Link CO2 and Global Warming (1856) - Red_Tarsius
https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/first-paper-to-link-co2-and-global-warming-by-eunice-foote-1856/
======
herogreen
The idea of a link between CO2 and a greenhouse effect was expressed before
that, by Claude Pouillet in 1838 (but maybe not published in a paper).

sources: [https://jancovici.com/changement-climatique/croire-les-
scien...](https://jancovici.com/changement-climatique/croire-les-
scientifiques/depuis-combien-de-temps-sait-on-que-lhomme-agit-ou-agira-sur-le-
climat/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect)

"1838: Claude Pouillet, a French physicist, attributes the natural greenhouse
effect to water vapor and carbon dioxide. He concludes that any change in the
amount of water vapor, such as CO2, is expected to result in climate change."
(google translate).

edit: I think it was this paper
[https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95017r/f1.image.r=Pou...](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95017r/f1.image.r=Pouillet,+Claude-
Servais-Matthias.langFR) but I have not checked (cannot Ctrl-F).

------
Brakenshire
I’ve always found climate scepticism strange, because of its emphasis on
refusing to accept the connection between rising temperatures and CO2. This
really seems to be the least defensible position which could be chosen. The
“scepticism” is disputing really basic science which has been well understood
for a long time, and it’s in that sense that calling it denial is accurate. It
would be much more defensible to accept a lower level of climate sensitivity,
but dispute the mechanisms which cause higher sensitivity, or possible future
positive feedback effects.

~~~
flash_zombie
> I’ve always found climate scepticism strange, because of its emphasis on
> refusing to accept the connection between rising temperatures and CO2.

The connection isn't disputed, the causality is. Look at this graph:

[https://totheleftofcentre.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/400000...](https://totheleftofcentre.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/400000yearslarge.gif?w=1000)

You can see that most of the time, temperature rises _lead_ increases in CO2.
This implies that rising temperature increases CO2 levels, but not necessarily
the other way around.

If you zoom out even further, the correlation isn't clear anymore at all:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cx5-osJUkAAPkF8.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cx5-osJUkAAPkF8.jpg)

Lastly, what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures? Even
without humans, this planet would go in and out of ice ages on semi-regular
intervals. We can't really control that. Life adapts. In the interest of our
descendants, we had better develop technology to deal with a tougher climate,
rather than cut down on emissions so that maybe ten or twenty generations can
live with a somewhat smaller fallout of manmade climate change.

~~~
KnightOfWords
> Lastly, what's even the big issue with changes in global temperatures? Even
> without humans, this planet would go in and out of ice ages on semi-regular
> intervals. We can't really control that. Life adapts.

The issue is the rate of change, which is unprecedented. The path we're
currently on will devastate ecosystems and cause a huge drop in crop
production.

~~~
neuronic
If I may add to your sentence, specifically the last claim in your quote is
what puts their train of thought on a collision course with reality.

Life adapts, when it can. The rate of change you mentioned ensures that a
majority of life will not be able to adapt and it's not impossible that
another K-T level extinction event is already taking place.

Geologically speaking, the speed at which the Earth is changing from human-
induced climate change could just as well be a meteorite impact. Looking at
global conflict resolution ability I fear that we have no hope to stop it.

~~~
flash_zombie
> Life adapts, when it can. The rate of change you mentioned ensures that a
> majority of life will not be able to adapt and it's not impossible that
> another K-T level extinction event is already taking place.

It's also "not impossible" that a meteorite wipes us all out tomorrow. Which
serious scientist is predicting a K-T level extinction event?

Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over thousands of
years. That's not out of the ordinary in terms of variance for life on earth
right now. Sure, some species may have to migrate, some will go extinct one
way or another, but not a K-T level event.

~~~
pjc50
> Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over thousands of
> years.

Serious predictions are talking about a couple of degrees over _the next
century_. That's very different. It may be hard to separate the climate change
extinctions from the regular habitat destructions that are already ongoing,
though.

------
newnewpdro
There's some old German food/nutrition researcher I read who mentioned in
passing that co2 acted as a blanket in the atmosphere warming the planet. I
can't remember the author or title of the book, it was something from the
1800s I was skimming from archive.org.

I remember being dumbfounded at the time and pasting the excerpt to some
friends on IRC. People have known atmospheric co2 warms the planet for a
_very_ long time.

This book wasn't even about climate, it was about diet and evolution. It turns
out if you want to talk about the history of evolution, you have to talk about
the atmosphere and how it varied going through oxygen and carbon-rich periods.

~~~
gioele
From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#History)

«The existence of the greenhouse effect was argued for by Joseph Fourier in
1824. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude
Pouillet in 1827 and 1838 and reasoned from experimental observations by
Eunice Newton Foote in 1856. John Tyndall expanded her work in 1859 by
measuring radiative properties of a wider spectrum of greenhouse gases. The
effect was more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who made the
first quantitative prediction of global warming due to a hypothetical doubling
of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, the term "greenhouse" was not used to
refer to this effect by any of these scientists; the term was first used in
this way by Nils Gustaf Ekholm in 1901.»

------
jokoon
I wonder how intelligence agencies and the military are preparing for climate
change.

~~~
PavlovsCat
The last article I saw on that wasn't exactly encouraging:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
insight/2013/j...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism)

------
jacobush
I want to learn to write like this:

 _" An atmosphere of [carbon dioxide] would give to our earth a high
temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had
mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased
temperature…must have necessarily resulted."_

~~~
ehnto
Read a few Jules Verne books and give it your best shot.

~~~
spats1990
One may suppose, too, that a healthy smattering of works by the great Edgar
Allen Poe might come in handy, disregarding, of course, their largely
unscientific nature; furthermore, if one wishes to write in such a fashion,
one must devote oneself to the cause of attractive semicolon usage... a
largely forgotten art in these modern times.

~~~
jacobush
Yeah, that is neat, but it doesn't have the nice punch of _must have
necessarily resulted._ from above.

------
punnerud
In the Norwegian engineer paper (TU) from 1960 the main discussions of their
time was that they had to get away from burning trees as energy source and use
oil/coal or water fall to get the energy to supply the industry.

Lot of talks about deforestation with examples that we have not recovered from
today (example Røros).

~~~
Brakenshire
One of the tragedies of our failure to tackle GHG emissions is that now
reasonable pathways to stay under 2C of warming require massive negative
carbon sequestration after 2040, and at the moment the only way to do that is
burning wood and capturing the CO2 emissions. The volume of wood which will
have to be burnt each year is more than the volume of all international
shipping. That is going to mean covering huge areas of land in industrial
plantations which will probably damage wildlife further. Because we’ve delayed
action, we’re entering into the teeth of a dilemma which will drive further
mass extinctions whatever we do, either remove habitat for wood production for
negative carbon, or accept high levels of warming.

~~~
abraae
Why does sequestration involve burning wood? Isn't it easier to leave the
carbon in wood form and build e.g furniture, buildings, structures out of
wood, and leave the carbon there?

~~~
baq
do you need a thousand chairs? skyscrapers can't be built out of wood, too.

the easiest way would be to just bury the wood (we dug it out in the first
place, right?) but we need to make sure that it doesn't rot and thus reenter
the atmosphere. that's where burning makes sense.

~~~
imtringued
>skyscrapers can't be built out of wood, too.

Skyscrapers can't be built out of concrete either. It's the rebar that is the
structural component that makes it possible to build skyscrapers. We can build
skyscrapers with mass timber and steel reinforcement nowadays.

------
jgrahamc
Babbage wrote about using tree rings to study the ancient climate in 1838:
[https://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/charles-babbage-and-climate-
cha...](https://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/charles-babbage-and-climate-change.html)

------
dankohn1
My (12 minute long) KubeCon + CloudNativeCon keynote in Barcelona this year
used Foote's discovery of global warming as an example of simultaneous
invention, and compared it to the creation of over a dozen container
orchestrators other than Kubernetes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmGFgZ889kY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmGFgZ889kY)
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YkvOgnnbTqWIzQnyaUUp...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YkvOgnnbTqWIzQnyaUUp3S5AMbZHNPMUMlTF2aGQgk0/)

------
sid-kap
The paper refers to CO2 as "carbonic acid gas". At this time, did they know
that CO2 was also produced by burning fossil fuels? Or by respirating living
things?

~~~
labster
I think other commenters have answered your question, but I thought I'd talk a
little on carbonic acid.

Carbon dioxide partitions into water as carbonic acid. This is the key
mechanism in ocean acidification. Of course the rate is affected by pH of the
oceans, there's a buffering action going on between carbonate, bicarbonate,
and carbonic acid depending on how many protons are available. It's also why
pure water sitting open to the air will have a slightly acidic pH.

The oceans at the bottom have a decent layer of carbonate material accumulated
from shells, which are also at equilibrium with the ocean, but the other
direction (accepting protons). But since the oceans are so big, to increase
the pH of the oceans you'd have to send the surface water to the bottom.
Mixing the oceans is kind of a slow process -- around 500 years. But in theory
we'll get some long term climate help from the ocean floor (well, if the
methane clathrates don't get us first).

