How Do We Know that Increasing CO2 Causes Warming?
This is part 1 of a two part post. The evidence that increasing CO2 causes air temperature to warm began to accumulate as far back as the 1850s with studies from William Tyndal l[1][2] in the UK. Tyndall's experiment can be roughly replicated in high school lab classrooms with pretty simple experiments, some of which are demonstrated on YouTube. Estimates of climate sensitivity to increasing CO2 can be found in the works of Arrhenius[4] in the 1890s and Plass in the 1950s.[5] The landmark work of Manabe in 1967 successfully modeled the effects of increasing CO2 on the climate system. His study produced theoretical predictions that have been observed ever since. Especially since the satellite era, for instance, scientists have observed that the stratosphere is cooling while the troposphere is warming, just as Manabe expected. In the 1970s, scientists arrived at an estimate of equilibrium climate sensitivity[7] of about 3 C; an estimate that still continues to be at the center of sc...