A Way Forward on Climate Change
by TIMOTHY E. WIRTH
When the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius suggested in 1896 that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could warm the surface temperature of the Earth, the industrial revolution was in full swing. Even so, Arrhenius did not foresee the exponential growth in fossil fuel use that would ensue, and in 1908 he predicted that it would take 3000 years to double atmospheric concentrations of CO2.2 He was off by 2800 years. Without intervention, a doubling will occur in this century.
When the American chemist Charles Keeling began measuring atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa in Hawaii in 1958, the concentration had already risen from 280 parts per million (ppm) in pre-industrial times to 315 ppm, an increase of 12.5%. In 2007 that number reached 384 ppm, a third of the way toward Arrhenius’s doubling, and the rate of increase has itself doubled.
