GCC #3
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.
Hi Iım Bryan Yeaton for the Weather Notebook and today we continue our special series on global climate change.
JF: He was a really smart guy and smart guys come up with ideas that no one else has thought of.
Who is this "smart guy? " John Finn, professor of chemistry at Dartmouth College, gives us a hint:
JF: He was really the founding father of what we know today as greenhouse phenonema and global warming.
Well, if you donıt know who that founding father is donıt feel too badly. Not many people do, even those who study global climate change.
The founding father was Svante Arrhenius . A Swede born in 1859,, he gained renown for his work in electrochemistry for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903. But he had other interests including climatology and geophysics. In particular he wanted to know how CO2 affected the ice ages.
JF: He was able to make estimates of how many degrees centigrade would increase in the Arctic climate if carbon dioxide levels were to increase by various amounts.
Finn says Arrhenius was amazingly close to the more accurate predictions made in the last 20-30 years and he was the first to raise concerns about anthropogenic greenhouse gases.. If the Swedish chemist missed anything, it was underestimating the building up CO2.
JF: He was alive at time when industrial age pumping out great quantities of CO2 from all sorts of combustion sources but I don't think he recognized how rapidly they were going to grow and of course there were not many autos around either.
Thatıs John Finn, a Professor of Chemistry at Dartmouth College taking about Svante Arrhenius.
The Weather Notebook is a production of the mount Washington Observatory. Our special series on global climate change is supported by the New England Science Center Collaborative and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation.