A SIMPLE HISTORY OF GLOBAL WARMING

On many Wednesdays, I revert back to the original purpose of this blog site, Simple Solutions for Planet Earth and Humanity.  My first real job was as a biomass engineer for the sugar industry in 1962.  In those days global warming was not a  concern.  In fact, global cooling was an issue blown up now and then in the media.

Going back in time, French physicist Joseph Fourier in the 1820's explained the  Greenhouse theory and the possible effect on global warming.  Then in the 1860's Irish scientist John Tyndall looked at what kinds of gases were likely to play a role.

In 1895 Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius became curious about how decreasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might COOL our Earth.  He wondered if decreased volcanic activity would reduce the carbon dioxide percentage to explain historic ice ages.  He calculated that if CO2 levels were halved, global temperatures would decrease by 9 F.    But as a secondary thought, he wondered about the reverse.  What if CO2 doubled, then the temperature would rise 9F.  Ironic that Arrhenius' efforts are now cited as the original basis for global warming.

In the 1930's, British engineer Guy Callendar noted that regions in the United States and North Atlantic had significantly warmed on the heels of the Industrial Revolution.  But he was not taken seriously.

The person who, perhaps, most spurred the serious study of global warming was American geochemist Charles Keeling.  Keeling studied under Harrison Brown at Cal Tech.  Roger Revelle of Scripps hired Keeling and set him up to do the measurements.  I knew Brown well when he later moved to the East Center, and I worked with Revelle on Earth 2020.

Keeling measured CO2 levels on Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory, dramatically showing that something ominous was happening.  Computer models of Keeling's Curve consistently showed that a doubling of CO2 would warm atmosphere of our planet by 2-3.6 F within a century.

But you can do interesting things with data, and the curve below is a partial derivative of the one to the right.  

In the 1970's, pollutants in the atmosphere scared scientists to theorize that sunlight would be blocked and the Earth would cool.  Turned out that from 1940 to 1970 the postwar boom in aerosol pollutants did cool the planet, and TIME magazine in 1974 had an article worrying about the next Ice Age.  

Skeptics, however, doctored a TIME 1977 cover to show flip-flop with a 2006 cover:  The actual cover is to the right.  There is little doubt that the atmospheric CO2 level of our planet has continued to increase now for more than sixty years (from 313 parts per million in 1958 to 406 ppm at the end of 2018 and getting close to 416 ppm today).

The first World Climate Conference occurred in 1979 in Geneva, the year I joined the U.S. Senate.  The gathering led to an ozone protection agreement in 1985.  This collaboration worked so well that the Montreal Protocol was the result in 1987 to use the same action model for something like global warming, which was not yet a major issue.

In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created to be managed by the United Nations  The first UN conference was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.  After an inordinate number of gatherings and frameworks and assessments, an actual agreement was reached with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, giving adherents a decade to meet certain targets.  The IPCC actually won the Nobel Prize, with Al Gore, in 2007.

Have you noticed I haven't mentioned even one female involved in this issue of crucial importance to the fate of humanity?  Of course, many have been involved in the IPCC and all segments of the research.  Wikipedia provides a long list of important contributions by women.  However, not one individual has attained any kind of universally recognizable role.  Maybe that's the missing ingredient, for Yale University showed how females are definitely more sensitive to the issue and would more likely take concrete steps to remediate global climate change:

A whole bunch more reports and meetings led to the Paris Agreement in 2015, which was the 21st Conference of the Parties. The following year, 175 world leaders personally signed the agreement at the UN Headquarters in New York City.  This number went up to 184.

Fabulous, right?  Wrong.  "Developing nations" like China and India were provided certain accommodations, then, Donald Trump was elected PUS (President of the United States), fresh from his past comments:

•  "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
• "This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice."
• "NBC News just called it the great freeze - coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?"
• "I believe in clean air. Immaculate air.... But I don't believe in climate change."

So as President, he decided to pull the USA out of the Paris Agreement.  But these protocol writers aren't idiots, for they wrote down a restriction that a country which signs cannot leave till the end of 2020, which happens to be after the next presidential election.  Another reason why my sense that the environment might be the crucial different-maker in the 2020 election.

So today, it is President Donald Trump, many Republicans (only 37% favor reducing fossil fuel use, versus 80% for Democrats), plus the oil/gas/coal industry, versus 97% of scientists and much of the world, including India and China, which have ratified the process.  Russia is still pondering about this next step.  The future of the Nation, Humanity and Planet Earth could well be at stake in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.

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