Who first proposed major human impacts on climate?
The idea of global warming from a runaway greenhouse effect due to the mass burning of fossil fuels is not a new one. It may have been first proposed at the end of the last century by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist. He estimated that global tem peratures could possibly rise as much as 10°F. Today’s sophisticated computer models continue to yield a similar broad range of potential impacts.
The human race continues to use massive quantities of hydrocarbons as fuel. Our present day oils, coals, and gases took approximately half a billion years to form. We are using them up, however, at one million times their formation rate. Combustion of fos sil fuels and forest burning are causing a measurable increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Once emitted, a molecule of CO may remain in the atmos phere for 50 to 200 years on the average. In the last three decades, the annual release of global carbon dioxide into the atmosphere has doubled. The concentrations remaining in the atmosphere are increasing at a rate of about a half percent per year.