Alt-text:
Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he’d “wasted over a full year” doing tedious calculations by hand about “so trifling a matter” as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).
Fourier was out there saying humans might have a big impact on the climate all the way back in 1824, and Eunice Foote demonstrated the heating effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 1856
Here’s a mural they recently made in Mainz, Germany, in memory of Paul Crutzen, who popularized the term ‘anthropocene’.
Fourier the mathematician?
I’ve known this, and every time I remember it I get sad for a longer period
We are like a person that eats too much. We always knew that we should eat less, but we got away with it for some time and didn’t gain that much weight in the beginning. However, now we need new pants and our blood pressure is through the roof. We can no longer deny reality.
So, can we get our shit together, live healthy and lose weight/CO2?
Many obese people can’t change, but some do succeed. So there is hope. More and more people in this body of ours realise that we should stop listening to the parts that want to go to the all you can eat fossil buffet every day.
This parallel between individual overeating and global overheating is a central trope for Ian McEwan’s novel Solar (2010). The increasingly overweight protagonist is called “the expanding universe” at one point.
Goddammit, Randall. This is the worst “we are farther from X than X is to Y” yet
But incinerating the planet is so profitable! Does no one think about the shareholders?
Dude, didn’t you see about how some companies bought some carbon offsets? The situation solved quit living in the past.
What? We didn’t figure out the “greenhouse effect” in 2024
You misread it. It says we figured it out in 1896.
