John Tyndall on the Greenhouse Effect, 1859

John Tyndall

John Tyndall is often credited with discovering the Greenhouse Effect. That's not quite true, since Eunice Foote's paper was published before Tyndall's. However, this quote from Tyndall's paper is remarkable. Not only did he understand that greenhouse gases trapped heat, he understood that it was the heat radiating from the planet that was trapped, not the solar energy entering the climate system. Here's an excerpt from John Tyndall's 1859 paper entitled, "On the Transmission of Heat of different qualities through Gases of different kinds."
The bearing of this experiment upon the action of planetary atmospheres is obvious. The solar heat possesses, in a far higher degree than that of the lime light, the power of crossing an atmosphere; but, and when the heat is absorbed by the planet, it is so changed in quality that the rays emanating from the planet cannot get with the same freedom back into space. Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.

In the admirable paper of M. Pouillet already referred to, this action is regarded as the cause of the lower atmospheric strata being warmer than the higher ones; and Mr. Hopkins has shown the possible influence of such atmospheres upon the life of a planet situated at a great distance from the sun."[1]
There is some very interesting reflection on this study that is also worth reading.[2][3] Tyndall's paper was published after Eunice Foote in the U.S. first discovered that increasing CO2 concentrations will also cause the atmosphere to warm.[4] The science of climate change is over 150 years old, and there has been no evidence offered to suggest that it's wrong.

John Tyndall's Device for Observing Radiant Heat Absorption

References:

[1] John Tyndall (1859), "On the Transmission of Heat of different qualities through Gases of different kinds."
https://ozonedepletiontheory.info/Papers/Tyndall1859TransmissionHeat.pdf

[2] Steve Graham, "John Tyndall (1820-1893)"
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Tyndall

[3] Mike Hulme, "On the origin of ‘the greenhouse effect’: John Tyndall’s 1859 interrogation of nature"
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/wea.386?fbclid=IwAR3ZNUmHNvEAbQxeOqqWpL6VpPYyF80shoR2T1t-A5kJuXloUoYGajtQ6MY

[4]Eunice Foote, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays”, in American Journal of Art and Science, 2nd Series, v. XXII/no. LXVI, November 1856, p. 382-383.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/first-paper-to-link-co2-and-global-warming-by-eunice-foote-1856

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roy Spencer on Models and Observations

Image
A few days ago, Dr. Roy Spencer wrote a piece for the Heritage Foundation called, " Global Warming: Observations vs. Climate Models " ( PDF ) essentially arguing that models show too much warming compared to observations, and if we stick to observations, "global warming offers no justification for carbon-based regulation." He claims to frame his argument in terms of answering three questions: Is recent warming of the climate system materially attributable to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, as is usually claimed? Is the rate of observed warming close to what computer climate models—used to guide public policy—show? Has the observed rate of warming been sufficient to justify alarm and extensive regulation of CO2 emissions? We should keep in mind that this is a political document intended to support the political aims of the Heritage Foundation, and Spencer has carefully selected what he says and doesn't say to fit the political agenda of the Heritage Found
Read more

The Marketing of Alt-Data at Temperature.Global

Image
Temperature.Global (12-month running average, sort of) A few years ago, I started seeing people post links to a new dataset for global temperatures at a website called temperature.global. There are at least four unique features of this dataset. First, the website claims to update global temperature in near real time. Second, every year in the dataset averages below "normal." Third, there is absolutely no transparency regarding their methodology (those who administer it are anonymous, most of the data is hidden, and much of their methodology is unclear). And fourth, what is disclosed about their methodology reveals that what they are calculating is not the Earth's surface temperature. Description of Temperature.Global If you go to the temperature.global website, it becomes almost immediately apparent that this website has little concern for transparency. The website is hosted by Parler (the alternative social network), which if nothing else is pretty odd. There are no name
Read more

Patrick Frank Publishes on Errors Again

Image
Recently I came across yet another paper by Patrick Frank[1] attempting to claim that climate scientists have been underestimating uncertainties in climate-related data. In this paper, he takes aim at GMST data, and he argues that  LiG resolution limits, non-linearity, and sensor field calibrations yield GSATA mean ±2σ RMS uncertainties of, 1900–1945, ±1.7 °C; 1946–1980, ±2.1 °C; 1981–2004, ±2.0 °C; and 2005–2010, ±1.6 °C. Finally, the 20th century (1900–1999) GSATA, 0.74 ± 1.94 °C, does not convey any information about rate or magnitude of temperature change. The resulting GMST graph from his calculations is below. Essentially, he's saying that errors associated with liquid in glass thermometers are so large that we can have no confidence in the global warming trend in the major GMST datasets. Of course, the organizations producing these GMST datasets all evaluate the uncertainties associated with their anomaly values, and their estimates are invariably much smaller - about ±0.05°
Read more