![]() He assembled temperature data from around the globe and made ingenious use of a set of measurements that had been taken a decade earlier by an American astronomer, Samuel Pierpont Langley. ![]() On Christmas Eve, 1894, he began constructing a climate model-the world’s first. The climate system, meanwhile, is immensely complicated, with feedback loops nestled within feedback loops.Īrrhenius, who would later win a Nobel Prize for an unrelated discovery, plunged ahead anyway. He lacked crucial information about which wavelengths, exactly, CO 2 absorbs. Arrhenius didn’t have a calculator, let alone a computer. The math involved in testing this theory went far beyond what was possible at the time. What if, Arrhenius speculated, the amount of CO 2 in the air had varied? Could that explain the glaciers’ ebb and flow? In the atmosphere, it allowed visible light to pass through, but it absorbed the longer-wave radiation that the Earth was constantly emitting to space. The following year, Arrhenius came up with a different-and, he thought, better-idea: carbon dioxide.Ĭarbon dioxide, he knew, had curious heat-trapping properties. But what had caused the great ice sheets to descend, carrying all before them? And then what had caused them to retreat, allowing the rivers to flow once again and the forests to return? In 1893, the society debated various theories that had been proposed, including one linking the ice ages to slight variations in the Earth’s orbit. All over Sweden lay signs of the glaciers that had, for vast stretches of time, buried the country: rocks with parallel scrapings strange, sinuous piles of gravel huge boulders that had been transported far from their source. (Whatever the quality of his instruments, Andrée’s voyage would result in his death and the death of his two companions.)Ī question that particularly interested the Physics Society was the origin of the ice ages. The society devoted several sessions to considering the instruments that would be needed by Salomon August Andrée, another early member of the group, who had decided to try to reach the North Pole via balloon. The topics ranged widely, from aeronautics to volcanology. Physics Society meetings consisted of lectures on the latest scientific developments, many delivered by Arrhenius himself, followed by discussions that often lasted well into the night. Among the society’s earliest members was a Högskola student named Sofia Rudbeck, who was described by a contemporary as both “an excellent chemist” and “a ravishing beauty.” Arrhenius began writing her poetry, and soon the two wed. For a fee of one Swedish crown, anyone could join. That same year, he founded the Stockholm Physics Society, which met every other Saturday evening. In 1891, he got his first teaching job, at an experimental university in Stockholm called the Högskola. He believed that science should-and could-be accessible to all. Svante Arrhenius was, by nature, an optimist.
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