Articles Tagged "Peter Ravenscroft"

Click source to download PDF file and read FULL essay from Peter Ravenscroft "Why carbon is innocent"

The following is a reply to article in regard to Elaborate Nonsense from 1896 by Peter Ravenscroft.

Derek found the 1901 review of Angström’s criticisms that was published in Monthly Weather Review. I’ve transcribed it below in case any of you might wish to cite it. What stands out for me especially is Angström’s claim that Arrhenius failed to distinguish water vapor’s absorption from CO2’s, thus leading to an over-estimate of CO2’s absorptive power.AS

Monthly Weather Review, June 1901, page 268

KNUT ANGSTROM ON ATMOSPHERIC ABSORPTION.

While the recent Bulletin G by Prof. F. W. Very, on atmospheric radiation was in press, Prof. Knut Angström of Upsala, was preparing a short paper on the part played by aqueous vapor and carbon dioxid gas in the phenomena of absorption in the earth’s atmosphere, which was published in the Annalen der Physik immediately afterwards. In this memoir based on unpublished researches of Dr. J. Koch at Upsala, on the absorption of radiation from heat sources at different temperatures by various depths of gas, Professor Angström approximately determines the influence of a layer of carbon dioxid gas 30 centimeters thick and under a pressure of 780 millimeters, absorbing the radiation from a black body at 100° temperature, and finds that it is about 10 per cent and that it does not change more than four-tenths of one per cent of the original radiation when the pressure is decreased to 520 millimeters. He infers, therefore, that a layer so thick as to be equivalent to that contained in the earth’s atmosphere will absorb about 16 per cent of the earth’s radiation, and that this absorption will vary very little with any changes in the proportion of carbon dioxid gas in the air. This limitation of the absorption to spectral regions between definite wave lengths is also rendered very probable by Paschen’s observations in the Annalen der Physik, volume 51, page 33.

Svante Arrhenius, 1896b, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (fifth series), April 1896. vol 41, pages 237–275

Svante Arrhenius wrote a complex paper* in 1896 on how carbon dioxide in the air is warming the earth's surface.

Here is how Wiki summarises it:

'Arrhenius developed a theory to explain the ice ages and first speculated that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.[3] He was influenced by the work of others, including Joseph Fourier. Arrhenius used the infrared observations of the moon by Frank Washington Very and Samuel Pierpont Langley at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh to calculate the absorption of CO2 and water vapour. Using 'Stefan's law' (better known as the Stefan Boltzmann law), he formulated his greenhouse law. In its original form, Arrhenius' greenhouse law reads as follows: