Prior to the 1700s:
- Scientists assumed
prehistoric climates
were similar to
the modern climate
Late 1700s:
- Geologists find evidence
of geological ages,
with changes in climate.
Early 1800s:
- Ice ages suspected
- Natural greenhouse effect identified.
- 1815 - Jean-Pierre Perraudin
Glaciers might be responsible
for giant boulders in alpine valleys.
- 1824 - Joseph Fourier
Earth's atmosphere
keep our planet warmer
than it would be in a vacuum.
- 1837 - Louis Agassiz
"Ice Age" theory to explain
why glaciers covered Europe
and much of North America.
Late 1800s:
- Human greenhouse gas emissions,
volcanoes, and solar energy variations,
could change the climate.
- 1856 - Eunice Newton Foote
Warming effect of the sun
increased by the presence
of carbonic acid gas (carbon dioxide).
An atmosphere rich in this gas
would have a higher temperature.
- 1859 - John Tyndall
Investigated absorption
of infrared radiation
in different gases.
Found that water vapor,
methane (CH4), and
carbon dioxide (CO2)
strongly block radiation.
- 1896 - Svante Arrhenius
Calculated effect of a
doubling of atmospheric
CO2 to be an increase
in surface temperatures
of +5 to +6 degrees C.
- 1899 - Thomas Chamberlin
Changes in climate could result
from changes in atmospheric CO2.
1900s:
- 1938 - Guy Stewart Callendar
Presented evidence that temperature
and the CO2 level in the atmosphere
had been rising over the past half-century.
Argued that newer spectroscopic
measurements showed CO2
was effective in absorbing
infrared in the atmosphere.
- 1955 - Hans Suess
Carbon-14 isotope analysis
showed CO2 released
from fossil fuels was not
immediately absorbed
by the ocean.
- 1957 - Roger Revelle
The ocean's surface layer
had only a limited ability
to absorb CO2 ... predicting
the rise in CO2 levels
( later proven by
Charles David Keeling ).
1960s:
- Growing consensus that
CO2 had a warming effect
- 1967 - Syukuro Manabe
and Richard Wetherald
First detailed calculation
of the greenhouse effect
incorporating convection
("Manabe-Wetherald
one-dimensional
radiative-convective model")
A doubling of CO2
would result in
an approximately
+2 degrees C.
increase in global temperature,
(in the absence of
unknown feedbacks,
such as changes in clouds).
1970s:
- Atmospheric aerosols
(aka "pollution")
could have cooling effects
by blocking sunlight.
- 1976 - Nicholas Shackleton
Showed ice age timing came
from a 100,000-year Milankovitch
orbital change.
1980s:
- 1982 - Hans Oeschger, Willi Dansgaard
Greenland ice cores reveal
large temperature variations
within a human lifetime
- 1985 - V. Ramanathan
Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs),
methane, and other trace gases,
could be nearly as important as CO2.
After the 1970s,
climate science
climate science
devolved into
false claims that:
false claims that:
"the science is settled".
Those claims were followed by
three decades of wild guess
predictions of the future average
temperature, "supported" by
meaningless computer models.
I say "meaningless computer
models" because the models
have made consistently wrong
average temperature predictions
for over 30 years --
wild guesses of warming
averaging triple the actual warming !
If the temperature predictions
are that far off, what you have
is not a "model" of the real
climate change process,
-- just a very wrong failed
prototype, based on
a wrong wild guess
about a process
(climate change)
still not understood.
Using a 'scientific name'
-- "general circulation model" --
does not change the fact
that the model has failed
to predict anything.