Climate Special 4: Climate Science Pioneers

As we continue our Friday series on China-US Climate Cooperation, today, we will introduce pioneers in the field of climate science going back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and counting up the generations right up till today. 

Transcript

Climate Science Pioneers

As we continue our Friday series on China-US Climate Cooperation, today, we will introduce pioneers in the field of climate science going back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and counting up the generations right up till today. 

The greenhouse effect is a natural process through which heat is maintained in the atmosphere so planet Earth remains suitable for life to thrive – the so-called Goldilocks Zone – neither too hot nor too cold. But human activities since the Industrial Revolution, which began in the UK in

the mid-18th century, have caused a huge increase in greenhouse gas emissions, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels. This causes extra heat to become trapped in the atmosphere. And because the climate issue did not start appearing on the agendas of governments at the national level until as recently as the 1990s, it may surprise you to know that scientists have been tracking anthropogenic climate change for more than 200 years. 

So, today, we want to introduce (in chronological order) several climate scientists from the past who were all pioneers in their own time. 

First up is a man considered to be the founding father of climate science – the French mathematician, physicist, and Egyptologist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (4-e-a) who lived from 1768 to 1830. Monsieur Fourier is credited with the discovery of the “greenhouse effect,” though he himself did not use the term. He believed the Earth should be colder than it was if the sun was the only source of heat. In 1822, in his book The Analytical Theory of Heat published in Paris, he devised what are known as Fourier series equations to show how heat diffuses from a hot to a cold area. In 1824, he proposed in a paper titled On the Temperatures of the Terrestrial Sphere and Interplanetary Space that human activities and natural forces can impact the ground surface, water distribution and air movement, which in turn change the heat and temperature of the Earth over time.

Next, and most certainly the Mother Nature of climate scientists, is Eunice Newton Foote who lived from 1819 to 1888. Mrs. Foote was an American scientist who established the relationship between CO2 concentrations and temperature change. Her findings, based on an experiment she conducted in her home lab in upstate New York, were published in the paper Circumstances Affecting the Heat of The Sun’s Rays in the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1856, making her the first person to discover the role CO2 plays in the greenhouse effect. Her experiment, consisting of cylinders filled with different gases and left to warm in the sun, concluded that an atmosphere of CO2 would (quote) “give to our Earth a high temperature.”

Around that same time, across the pond as they say, the famously flamboyant Irish physicist John Tyndall, who lived from 1820 to 1893, was conducting his own experiments along the same lines, that is, among other things, he was conducting experiments on the heat absorption properties of various gases. Fast-forward to a hundred years later and Professor Tyndall is also referred to as the father of climate science, even though his conclusions came three years later than Eunice Foote’s. Nonetheless, in 1859 using an apparatus he set up at the Royal Institution in London, he theorized how CO2 and water vapor absorbed and radiated heat, what we now know is infrared radiation. Moreover, he indicated these variations, if left unchecked, would ultimately cause climate change. Tyndall may not have been aware of Foote’s work earlier, but he did acknowledge that the theory was built on the work of Fourier and Claude Pouillet (pooYay) (1790-1868), a French physicist who proposed that CO2 and water vapor could trap heat in the atmosphere.

It would be a few decades for a Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) to take the next major step in climate science. In 1896, Arrhenius became the first person to calculate how much the temperature would rise depending on the amount of increase of CO2. His research paper was titled On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground and it was published in the Philosophical Magazine and the Journal of Science. In the article he estimated a rise of about 5-6°C if atmospheric CO2 doubled or tripled. He later proposed that fossil fuels were a big source of CO2. Climate research was only a minor part of his research. In fact, he went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1903 for his theory of electrolyte dissociation.

Next in line is Guy Stewart Callendar (1898-1964), a British steam and combustion engineer.

In 1938, Guy Callendar published a research paper called The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. Callendar’s research suggested that human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels, had added 150,000 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere over the past half century, which he estimated had already resulted in an average rise in global land temperatures of a total of 0.3°C over that period of time. He was the first in history to warn that global warming had been taking place for decades and that it was caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The process he described later became known in the field as the Callendar Effect. 

The next noteworthy development came with collaborating scientists Roger Revelle (1909-1991) who was an oceanographer from the U.S. and Hans Suess (1909-1993) who was an Austrian-American chemist and physicist. Roger and Hans discovered that seawater could not absorb all the additional CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, despite the widely held assumption, and that much more CO2 would remain in the atmosphere. In their 1957 paper, Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades, they noted that (quote) “The increase of atmospheric CO2 from this cause is at present small but may become significant during future decades if industrial fuel combustion continues to rise exponentially.” By the end of that decade, scientists started to warn the U.S. government that global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions might become a serious crisis in the future.

The next major warning came in a report prepared for the US National Research Council that was also submitted to president Jimmy Carter in 1979. Earlier that year, American meteorologist Jule Gregory Charney (1917-1981) led the Ad Hoc Study Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The report resulting from their research was called Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, and later became known as the Charney Report. In it, the Study Group predicted (quote) “the most probable global warming for a doubling of CO2 to be near 3°C with a probable error of 1.5°C.” And notably, that report’s estimate still holds true. 

Now, at this stage, there were already so many great research scientists contributing to the field of climate studies, and of course we can’t name them all, but I’d like to introduce three more individuals who made key contributions. 

American chemist Charles Keeling (1928-2005) is now famous for the iconic Keeling Curve, the world’s first continuous data record of atmospheric CO2 concentration. In 1958, Keeling began taking measurements at the Mauna Loa (MowNuh LohUh) Observatory in Hawaii. The observatory is still in operation today, run by his son Ralph Keeling, affiliated with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) at UC San Diego in La Jolla, California. The record shows rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 over time. For the week ending January 17, 2025, the concentration was 426.29 ppm (parts per million). And if that number doesn’t mean anything to you, I invite you to check out the website for Mauna Loa Observatory and study some graphs there that will really put it into perspective. 

Next, let’s talk about the American geochemist Wallace Smith Broecker (1931-2019). In the mid-1980s, Wallace Broecker, widely known as Wally, established the link between oceanic circulation and climate change. Before that, in 1975, when the world was still in a 40-year natural cooling cycle that had begun in the 1940s, he predicted that a warming cycle due to CO2 emissions caused by fossil fuel use would begin soon. His prediction proved accurate as the Earth’s average temperature has been rising since 1976. His paper Climate Change: Are We at the Brink of Pronounced Global Warming, published in 1975 in Nature is believed to

be the first time the term “global warming” appeared in scientific use, though Wally said he never wanted to be remembered for that.

And lastly, Syukuro Manabe, born in 1931, is a Japanese-American meteorologist. In 1967, Manabe and his colleague Richard Wetherald produced the first simple computer model of Earth’s climate, which concluded that doubling the CO2 content in the atmosphere could drive up global temperatures by about 2°C if humidity remained constant. Their research essentially settled the debate on the anthropogenetic greenhouse effect. Manabe won the 2021 Nobel prize in physics with the notation stating, “for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming.” 

Well, that’s the end of our podcast on China-US Climate Cooperation. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Li Jia, translator Du Guodong, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.