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GCC - Guy Callendar
Tue May 06, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Guy Stewart Callendar was a quiet and retiring man, an amateur scientist who worked in England
in relative obscurity to revive a climate change theory. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is
The Weather Notebook's weekly segment on global climate change.
In the 1930s, the carbon dioxide -- or CO2 -- theory of climate change, developed over 30
years earlier by Svante Arrhenius, was out of favor, pushed aside by other ideas. Most
climatologists at that time looked to changes in the sun or the circulation of the atmosphere
as the root cause of climate change. Until Guy Callendar there was an almost total lack of
concern for the effect of CO2 produced by burning fossil fuels.
In 1938 Callendar published a paper titled "The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and
Its Influence on Temperature," the first of many articles on the subject. He noted a
significant upward trend in temperatures for the first four decades of the 20th century and a
continuously rising concentration of atmospheric CO2 since pre-industrial times. He linked
this to the combustion of fossil fuels, describing it as an enhanced "greenhouse effect" where
infrared radiation is both absorbed and emitted by the extra CO2, causing warming at the
Earth's surface. As he wrote in 1939, "From the best laboratory observations, it appears that
the principal result of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide would be a gradual increase in
the mean temperature of the earth."
After Callendar died in 1964, others took credit for the theory. After all, Callendar was not
a professional scientist. But Charles Darwin, too, was an amateur, and historians of science
are now looking to Guy Stewart Callendar, as a pioneer in climate change theory.
Our series on climate change is funded by the New England Science Center Collaborative and the
Roy A. Hunt Foundation.
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