Monday, April 10, 2017

Donald Trump and Who Created the Concept of Climate Change

Updated November 2018

With the upcoming summit on the global climate about to take place in Poland, a look back in time at Donald Trump's beliefs on climate change is an interesting exercise.  Long before Donald Trump was even considering (at least publicly) a run for the Oval Office, he had an interesting viewpoint of the world.  While a significant portion of Americans believe that global climate change is not real, Mr. Trump had his own spin on the issue as shown in this tweet;


Here is a look at a timeline showing the significant events in the evolution of the global climate change concept:



While the concept of greenhouse gas accumulation and its impact on the global climate didn't really reach the public spotlight until the early- to mid-1980s, it was a paper by Svante Arrhenius entitled "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground" published in the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science in 1896 that was the first to quantify the contribution of carbon dioxide/carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect.  His paper also speculated about whether variations in the concentration of carbon dioxide/carbonic acid have contributed to long-term variations in the global climate.  Here are some interesting excerpts:




In the second paragraph on this page, he even links the quantity of carbon dioxide/carbonic acid to the world's production of coal, one of the first scientists to link the utilization of fossil fuels with the increased production of carbon dioxide/carbonic acid as shown here:


So, while Mr. Trump suggests that the Chinese are behind the concept of global warming, in fact, unless Svante Arrhenius, born in Sweden to Swedish parents, had some hidden genetic connection to China, Mr. Trump's spin on the creation of the concept of global warming is somewhat less than accurate and certainly far from scientific.


1 comment:

  1. I wish that the “timeline” had included reference to these articles: http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-runaway-greenhouse-event.html, http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/extinction.html, and http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2017/04/10c-or-18f-warmer-by-2021.html.

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