who discovered global warming?

Question

ok, who formulated the hypothesis of global warming? son asked and i don't know what to google.

Answer 1

Global warming has been known as a phenomenon for at least 200 years, and serious research into the human contribution to global warming has been going on for around 40 years.

The first person I ever heard talking about human CO2 emissions being a major contributing factor to global warming, and proposing that we do something about it was the famous British naturalist Sir Peter Scott (son of Robert Falcon Scott, the Antarctic explorer) around 1973. It was already an established theory by that time, however.

OK just found the answer from a google search -

"Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) was a Swedish scientist that was the first to claim in 1896 that fossil fuel combustion may eventually result in enhanced global warming. He proposed a relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature."

Answer 2

Excellent question but if I may rephrase it, what you probably meant is who formulated the hypothesis of the greenhouse gas effect?

The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius was the first to make the focus on the greenhouse effect (1890s). The first to identify the potential effect of human activity on the greenhouse effect was British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar in the 1930s. However both severely underestimated how quickly human emissions of greenhouse gases could start having a noticeable effect. This is because they were relying on experiments conducted at sea level. At higher altitudes, the temperature is lower and greenhouse gases absorb much more infrareds than at sea level.

Charles Keeling provided the first graphical illustration of the rise in temperatures, based on measurements he made at the observatory of Mauna Loa in Hawaii from 1958 onwards.

If your question was really about climate change, you would have to define what theory it is because I am not quite so sure. Climate changes all the time doesn't it? I'll have to think about that one a bit longer.

Cheers

Answer 3

Svante Arrhenius wrote a theory in around 1900 that it is CO2 in the atmosphere that keeps the heat in around the planet, and Charles Keeling was the first to notice that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere was increasing, but like most scientific theories, there's a team of scientists who came up with the actual global warming theory. They worked for the US National Science Foundataion and they made their findings public in 1963 when they issued a warning about global warming to the American government.

Answer 4

Here is one idea. In this Great Britain of ours, we had a Prime Minister called Margaret Thatcher. As some will know, she didn't get along very well with the miners. She wanted to push Nuclear power generation. So she got scientists to try and prove that human CO2 emissions causes global warming and told them, there is money in it [1]!

The models that climate change is based on exaggerate the level of human CO2 emissions and equations used are so sensitive that wrong assumptions, for example the percentage in human emissions used in equations is more than double from 0.45 to 1% (may seem small but it changes a lot), cause dramatic defects in the results [2].

And do we really think that us humans can heat the earth more than the big, hot spherical thing in the sky?! Water vapour is the biggest green house gas, over 80% of the green house gases is water vapour, personally i don't think CO2 emissions change the temperature that much. but i would like to bike to university in fresh air and still think that we need to cut these emissions down!

Answer 5

In the 70's we were headed for an ice age. Now someone has realized the temperature is slowly going up at about a degree a century. I suspect it was some obscure Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference that proposed it and now the media has jumped on the bandwagon and it's nothing but doom and gloom.

Answer 6

Here's a very complete history, way too long to post here, but very readable:

http://aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

Done by the American Institute of Physics

Answer 7

sorry,but you!ve lost me.global warming has been with us since time began.we are nearing the sun all the time.its not man made.blair tried to invent it as an excuse to charge more tax.

Answer 8

It wasn't discovered, it's a theory that's been around a long time, but now the politicians have found that the can raise taxes and scare the population, it's become a fact, (without any proof)

Answer 9

Some caveman who walked out of his cave tens of thousands of years ago and said "hey, didn't there used to be a glacier here?"

Nobody discovered it, it ( or it's inverse global cooling ) has always just been happening.

Answer 10

No idea, but when i get my hands on him (or her) then they will know what Global warming is all about.