An Accidental Discovery
Piecing together the history of man-made climate change
By Frank Parker
Copyright 2012 Frank Parker
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Cover image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
An Accidental Discovery
Piecing together the history of man-made climate change
Frank Parker
© Frank Parker, January 2012.
Table of Contents
Hans Suess, Roger Revelle and Another Pair of Swedes
Preface
All scientific theories start out with a discovery. The person responsible for the discovery puts forward a possible explanation for the phenomenon he or she has unearthed. Sometimes the theory might seem to lead to exciting or worrying possibilities. In such cases other individuals and teams follow up looking for other phenomena that are consistent with the theory. Often that search produces conclusive evidence that the original theory is mistaken.
Other times, Einstein's theory of relativity for example, it may not be possible to prove the hypothesis until new technologies become available with which to test it. On yet other occasions the discovery leads to applications undreamed of by the person making the original discovery. Liquid crystal technology springs to mind. In the early days of development and later, as the first crude applications in devices such as watches and calculators began to appear towards the end of the 1970s, few people would have foreseen the possibility of 21st century high definition flat screen televisions and monitors.
What is especially interesting to me is the way in which a discovery made by a specialist in one field and dismissed as of no interest is unexpectedly confirmed by someone working in a totally different field and who is unaware of the earlier discovery. That is how it was with the development of the theory of man-made global warming. The initial findings were made in the middle of the 19th century. It took more than a hundred years for people to begin to put together the facts unearthed by individuals and teams working independently in unrelated fields of interest and start to sound the warnings that, even now a dozen years into the twenty first century, are still deemed controversial by some of those whose activities threaten the continued existence of human life as we know it.
In this short treatise I have tried to tell the story of those diverse and unrelated discoveries and the men and teams that made them. I am grateful to all those who have written about these exceptional people and whose work I have drawn on in compiling this brief history. I have listed the sources used at the end to enable the interested reader to discover more.
Some of this material originally appeared in January 2011 as a series of articles at http://frank-parker.suite101.com/