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Svante Arrhenius
05/21/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi I'm 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 don't know who that founding father is don't 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
recognition 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 a time when the industrial age was 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.
That's 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.
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