The left continues to argue that energy companies have been covering up information and discussion about climate change. For many decades, scientists worldwide have studied the link between greenhouse gases and climate change.
Our goal is to highlight the fact that policymakers in the United States and around the world have been aware of the voluminous scientific research on these important issues and considered the difficult public policy questions relating to energy security, economic growth, and environmental protection that arise from these long-recognized risks.
In 1896, Svante Arrhenius published an article in Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, stating “the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression” such that an increase of carbonic acid would increase global temperatures while a decrease would reduce global temperatures by a similar amount.
In the early 1900s, T.C. Chamberlin, a professor of geology at the University of Chicago and president of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, initially followed Arrhenius’ research, stating that increases of carbon dioxide could warm the earth’s surface, leading to higher concentrations of water vapor in the air.
In 1900, Swedish scientist Knut Ångström published conclusions from flawed experiments suggesting that an increase in carbon dioxide would have an insignificant impact on radiation absorption, refuting Arrhenius’ conclusions.
In 1920, W.J. Humphreys, relying on Ångström’s conclusions, argued that, contrary to Arrhenius’ earlier conclusions, an increase or decrease in carbon dioxide would make no difference in the amount of infrared radiation absorbed by the atmosphere and would not noticeably change the Earth’s temperature.
In a 1938 publication, G.S. Callendar, a scientist at the British Electrical and Allied Industries Research Association, estimated a rise in global temperatures of 0.003℃ per year due to the artificial injection of carbon dioxide that had taken place to date, and asserted that humankind was “throwing some 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide into the air each minute.”
In 1953, Gilbert Plass demonstrated that water vapor and carbon dioxide absorbed and emitted energy at different wavelengths, and therefore should have separate effects on climate.
In 1955, the U.S. government established the first major climate modeling center, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (“NOAA”).
In 1957, Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, proposed that the majority of anthropogenic carbon dioxide released to date was most likely absorbed by the ocean, but the percent remaining in the atmosphere may “become significant during future decades if industrial fuel combustion continues to rise exponentially.”
In the 1960s, Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald, scientists at Princeton University’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, developed a climate model that could simulate, among other things, the way air and moisture conveyed heat from the Earth’s surface into the upper atmosphere. Using this model, in 1967, they estimated that a doubling of the CO₂ level in the atmosphere could lead to raising the temperature of the atmosphere by about 2.3℃.
In 1965, the National Science Foundation’s Special Commission on Weather Modification published a report titled Weather and Climate Modification, which estimated that CO2 increased by 10-15% in the 20th Century, resulting in significant changes to Earth’s heat balance.
In 1969, Keeling’s measurements showed that at least 40 percent of the carbon dioxide produced from fossil fuel combustion remained in the atmosphere instead of being absorbed by the ocean, plants, or other natural carbon sinks.
In 1970, Inadvertent Climate Modification: Report of the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate was published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the stated goal to “raise the level of informed public and scientific discussion and action on global and regional climate problems.”
In 1971, J. Murray Mitchell, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published a study that estimated the effect on the earth’s temperature of increasing aerosol particle concentrations.
In 1975, having constructed one of the first computer-based three dimensional Global Climate Models, Manabe and Wetherald estimated that a doubling of CO₂ would lead to an average warming of 3.5℃.
In 1977, the National Academy of Sciences published a report entitled Energy and Climate that expressed a concern about “highly adverse consequences” that may follow due to the increased use of fossil fuels for energy, with the panel of experts projecting that a global warming of 10 degrees Fahrenheit may result by the later part of the 22nd century.
In 1979, the U.S. National Research Council published Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment. The report, which came to be known as the “Charney Report” after the report’s chair, meteorologist Jule Charney, concluded that the composition of our atmosphere was indeed changing and, based on the results of five available climate models, that “the equilibrium surface global warming due to doubled CO2 will be in the range 1.5 ℃ to 4.5 oC, with the most probable value near 3 ℃.”
In 1980, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) published the Environmental Outlook 1980, which noted that carbon dioxide is known to have increased over the past 100 years, and that carbon dioxide pollution, specifically, the “increasing combustion of fossil fuels,” will result in a “predicted increase in global mean temperature from a ‘greenhouse effect’” which “could impact agriculture and regional hydrology worldwide.”
In 1982, the U.S. National Research Council published a follow-up report, Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Second Assessment, chaired by NOAA climate modeler Joseph Smagorinsky.