A VERY CONSERVATIVE EXPERIMENT
Hostilities in the climate wars are often fueled by ideology, right and left, but far from being a radical postmodern enterprise, climate science has been taking the future with a large grain of salt since before the Civil War.
That's when John Tyndall cut optics from infra-red transparent crystals of rock salt to measure radiant heat absorption by gases, which Fourier proposed around the time John Quincy Adams equipped the White House with energy efficient whale oil lamps. Between 1859 and 1861, Tyndall's work ran in learned journals established in the 17th and 18th centuries , like Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and The Philosophical Magazine :
"Now if, as the above
experiments indicate the chief influence be exercised by the aqueous vapour,
every variation of this constituent must produce a change of climate.
Similar remarks would apply to the carbonic acid diffused through the air, while an almost inappreciable admixture of any of the hydrocarbon vapours would produce great effects on the terrestrial rays and produce corresponding changes of climate."
--JOHN TYNDALL FRS: 'On the absorption and radiation of heat by gases and vapours'
Victoria & Albert's science advisor did not need a computer model or Fourier transforms to make his point. His steampunk experiment employed nothing fancier than a bunsen burner, a few transparent rock salt crystals, and some curious bits of Victorian plumbing, yet so strong and reproducible is the absorption of heat by carbon dioxide that you can feel the difference in warmth when a salt-windowed tube full of CO2 is interposed between a heat source and the palm of your hand.
153 years of getting the same very conservative result might convince any
disinterested Tory that Tyndall was on to something. It's a shame Lord Lawson and Viscount Monckton have fallen so far behind the times.
THE ORCHID HOUSE EFFECT
Word of Tyndall's researches spread to the far limits of the Empire, witness these 1884 remarks by an Australian Fellow of the Royal Society on the Duke of Argyle's discovery of tropical plant fossils in his chilly Scottish coal mines:
Many ingenious hypotheses have been proposed to account for the warmer climate of earlier times… and it appears to me that the true solution of the problem may be found in the constitution of the early atmosphere, when considered in the light of Dr. Tyndall's beautiful researches on radiant heat.
He has found that the presence of a few hundredths of carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere, while offering almost no obstacle to the passage of the solar rays, would suffice to prevent almost entirely the loss by radiation of obscure heat, so that the surface of the land beneath such an atmosphere would become like a vast orchid house, in which the conditions of climate necessary to a luxuriant vegetation would be extended even to the polar regions.— ALBERT K. VARLEY, F.R.S.
Mount Gambier, Australia , June 12, 1884.
