8) WHY DIDN'T SCIENTISTS RECOGNIZE GLOBAL WARMING SOONER?
Some did. In 1958, the National Academy of Sciences published a booklet titled “Planet Earth: The Mystery with 100,000 Clues,” which contained this prescient paragraph:
Our industrial civilization has been pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a great rate. By the year 2000 we will have added 70 percent more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If it remained, it would have a marked warming effect on the earth’s climate, but most of it would probably be absorbed by the oceans. Conceivably, however, it could cause significant melting of the great icecaps and raise sea levels in time.
When the authors wrote about the natural greenhouse effect that allows life on Earth to exist and pointed to the potential impact of human activities—specifically, adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels—they knew a good deal about the Earth’s energy balance. They also knew enough about the role of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in trapping heat radiated from the Earth’s surface to predict the potential future melting of ice caps and raised sea levels. But they were off on several key points. It would have been difficult to imagine the population of the planet more than doubling, and the demand for fossil fuel energy growing exponentially.
In fact, by the year 2000, the release of global fossil carbon emissions into the atmosphere went from around 2,000 million metric tons to more than 6,000 million metric tons of carbon, and now it is around 8,000 million metric tons, or 30,000 million metric tons of CO2. Moreover, the authors of “Planet Earth” anticipated the ocean would absorb most of the carbon dioxide when in fact it currently absorbs only about 30%, which is causing changes in the chemistry of the water that are acidifying the ocean.
|
