Climate Change: New Age Notion, Modern Myth, or Well Documented Reality

Many cynics today would say that climate change is little more than a New Age notion or modern myth. The truth is that we have known about the possibility that humans can alter the climate, change rainfall patterns, and influence temperatures since the days of the early Greeks.

To them, these changes could be brought about by chopping down trees, plowing fields, or irrigating a desert. One wonders what they would have said when they saw the massive scale of deforestation and the vast expanses of land that have been cultivated to provide for our ever-burgeoning world population!

However, these perceptions only allowed for local changes in climate, and the notion that humanity could negatively affect the global climate seemed too far-fetched for millenia. Why, there was a theory that persisted until the ‘Dust Bowl'—an event that occurred between 1930 and 1936 and saw severe droughts as well as massive dust storms that caused huge damage to the ecology and agriculture in the prairies of Canada and parts of the USA.

The hypothesis was that ‘rain follows the plow’, and it proposed that tilling the soil and other agricultural practices would actually result in an increase in rainfall. In fact, it was the adherence to this theory, now disproved, that contributed to the ‘Dust Bowl’ in the first place.

In the 1820s, Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician and physicist, developed a theory that the energy from the sun that reaches the Earth as sunlight has to be balanced by that which returns into space due to the fact that heated surfaces emit radiation. He also theorised that some of the energy must remain within the atmosphere and not be released into space, thus warming the planet.

This process, he proposed, is similar to that of a greenhouse, where energy enters the structure through the glass but remains trapped inside. Hence, the temperature within the greenhouse is much warmer than that which is outside its glass walls. 

Further research that started in the 1850s by Eunice Newton Foote and later by the Irish scientist John Tyndall showed that certain gases trapped the sun’s energy more than others and that any fluctuation in the levels of these could result in the energy either escaping more rapidly, resulting in a drop in temperature, or would have the opposite effect, thus increasing the temperature.

Foote’s findings were that the heating effect of the sun was greater in moist air than in dry air, but her most important discovery was that the highest degree of this heating occurred in an environment where there was an increase in carbon dioxide. Alas, Foote’s discoveries were never accredited to her in her lifetime because she was considered an ‘amateur scientist’, but her work did inspire Tyndall’s research, which made far-reaching discoveries.

Tyndall concentrated on exploring the exact gases that were most likely to influence the atmosphere’s ability to regulate the absorption and release of energy. His findings were astounding, looking retrospectively! He showed that coal gas, which contains CO2, methane, and other volatile hydrocarbons, affects atmospheric energy absorption more than other gases. In fact, he demonstrated that CO2 alone acted like a sponge and could absorb multiple wavelengths of sunlight. Might I remind my reader that these experiments were conducted in the 1860s?

Next in line, in 1895, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius proposed that a decrease in the carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere might have been the reason for the various ice ages, and he wondered if a decrease in volcanic activity, for whatever reason, had resulted in a lowering of CO2 levels, thus allowing more energy to be released from Earth and so resulting in a drop in temperature.

His calculations proved that halving global CO2 levels could reduce the world’s temperature by approximately 5 degrees Celsius or 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Then he returned to his theory, wondering if the reverse could also be true. This time he investigated, however remote it might have seemed at the time. The possible consequences of the levels of carbon dioxide being doubled. His results again were that global temperatures would in fact increase by the same amount—5 degrees C or 9 degrees Farenheit.

Fairly recently, modern climate change models have confirmed that Arrhenius’s calculations were more accurate than some gave him credit for at the time. There is much more to say on this, but surely this is sufficient to point out that climate change and global warming are far from being modern cliches and that we have been aware of the dangers, not counting the ancient Greek wisdom, for at least two centuries.

Yet, alas, humanity has still done precious little in solving the problem, apart from discussing them in endless committees and debating their validity in countless conferences. Even now, when the evidence is becoming more and more apparent, we still have not the inclination to actively seek viable solutions. 

Whether the problem lies in the issues being overpoliticized or if these solutions are still deemed too costly for the mega-corporations to even consider, the fact remains: the threat that climate change poses to the future of mankind and the planet that we call home is real. Thus, it is high time that we act upon implementing real change before it is too late!