. 24/7 Space News .
CLIMATE SCIENCE
No 'eureka moment': the evolution of climate science
By Kelly MACNAMARA
Paris (AFP) Aug 2, 2021

Countries need to be more ambitious in climate goals: UN
Paris (AFP) July 31, 2021 - Countries that have signed up to the Paris accord to tame climate change need to be more ambitious in their own national efforts, the UN's climate chief said on Saturday.

Only just over half of countries that are party to the accord have submitted updated proposals for limiting their carbon emissions, Patricia Espinosa said in a statement.

And "the level of ambition reflected in those national climate action plans also needs to be enhanced," she said.

The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty on climate change that was adopted by 196 countries in December 2015 with the aim of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and preferably to 1.5C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

Under the accord, every participating country originally had until the end of 2020 to submit new or updated "nationally determined contributions" or "NDCs".

But because of the global coronavirus pandemic and the postponement of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow to November 2021, a number of governments said they would be unable to meet the deadline.

By the new cut-off date on Friday, "the secretariat (had) received new or updated NDCs from 110 parties," Espinosa said, including the United States, which came back into the Paris Agreement after former president Donald Trump pulled out.

"This compares favourably with new or updated NDCs from 75 parties received up to the end of December 2020... but it is still far from satisfactory, since only a little over half the Parties (54 percent) have met the cut-off deadline."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has indicated that by the end of this decade, emissions must have been reduced by at least 45 percent compared to 2010 levels.

"Recent extreme heat waves, droughts and floods across the globe are a dire warning that much more needs to be done, and much more quickly, to change our current pathway. This can only be achieved through more ambitious NDCs," Espinosa said.

What if Earth's atmosphere was infused with extra carbon dioxide, mused amateur scientist Eunice Foote in an 1856 research paper that concluded the gas was very good at absorbing heat.

"An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature," she wrote in the study, published in the American Journal of Science and Arts and then swiftly forgotten.

The American scientist and women's rights activist, who only wrote one more paper, could not have known the full significance of her extraordinary statement, said Alice Bell, author of a recent book on the climate crisis -- "Our Biggest Experiment" -- that features Foote.

This was the decade that the United States first began to drill for oil. It is also the baseline period of global temperatures we now use to chart the fossil fuel driven warming of the planet.

Foote, whose work was rediscovered in recent years, is now seen as part of a multi-generational exploration, spanning some 200 years, unravelling the mysteries of how the climate works -- and more recently how human activities have tipped it out of balance.

"There is no eureka moment with one great genius in climate change science," Bell told AFP.

"Climate science is a story of people over centuries and different disciplines, different countries working together, incrementally learning more and more."

People have believed human activities like deforestation could alter the local climate since at least the ancient Greeks.

But in terms of the global climate, the story of our understanding of what we now call the greenhouse effect, arguably began in the 1820s with French scientist Joseph Fourier.

- Greenhouse gases -

Fourier calculated that Earth would be much colder if it was not enveloped in an insulating blanket of gases.

"He realised that the atmosphere was doing something to prevent heat immediately being radiated into space," said science historian Roland Jackson.

A few decades later -- in perhaps the first documented experiment of C02's warming potential -- Foote filled glass cylinders with ordinary air, moist air and carbon dioxide to see how hot they became in sunlight compared to shade.

The container with C02 warmed more than the others and "was many times as long in cooling", she reported, although she was not able to make a distinction between Earth's outgoing infrared radiation -- which is behind the greenhouse effect -- and incoming solar radiation.

"Carbon dioxide can absorb heat, that's her discovery," said Jackson, who co-authored an analysis of her work published by the Royal Society last year.

"And she made the supposition from that, that if you increase the amount of C02, it could change the climate. She needs to be recognised for that."

- Cooling fears -

A few years later, the Irish physicist John Tyndall performed a more rigorous study showing that water vapour and C02 absorbed infrared radiation -- the mechanism of the greenhouse effect.

His discovery was taken seriously, but even then it was twenty years before his findings on water vapour were fully accepted, said Jackson, who is the author of a biography of Tyndall. "C02 didn't feature."

In December 1882, a letter to the editor published in Nature cited Tyndall's work on gases.

"From this we may conclude that the increasing pollution of the atmosphere will have a marked influence on the climate of the world," said the letter, signed H. A. Phillips, in one of the earliest published links between human-made emissions and a changing climate.

But it would be decades before there was wider concern that coal smoke belching from factories could one day heat the whole planet.

When Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius -- a distant relation of climate campaigner Greta Thunberg -- suggested in the late 1800s that burning fossil fuels could influence the climate and calculated what would happen if C02 doubled, it was not seen as a cause for alarm.

This is not only because the amounts of C02 being emitted at the time were considered negligible, but also because scientists were preoccupied with understanding the carbon cycle in relation to past ice ages, said Robbie Andrew of the CICERO Center for International Climate Research.

"Nothing survived in large parts of the planet during the Ice Age, that's kind of the thinking -- 'We hope we're not going back there'," he told AFP.

Even into the 1930s, when scientists said temperatures were already rising, they thought a little warming could be beneficial.

"The idea that it changed not only temperatures, but other aspects of climate might not have occurred to them," said Andrew, who has compiled a history of emissions predictions.

- 'Life itself' -

There are a few examples of public commentary linking emissions to the risks of warming, although Andrew said the burning of coal was largely seen as a "necessary evil" and health fears were put aside for the sake of progress.

In 1958, an American television show, The Bell Telephone Science Hour, said C02 from factories and cars could be warming Earth's climate.

"We are not only dealing with forces of a far greater variety than even the atomic physicist encounters, but with life itself," the narrator said.

But fear of global cooling -- centred on aerosol pollution and the nuclear winter that would follow atomic warfare -- was dominant, and continued well into the 1970s and 80s.

It was only in 1975 that the scientist Wallace Broecker wrote a paper asking "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" and the expression began to enter the popular lexicon.

And in 1988, amid record temperatures, US government scientist James Hansen told a Congressional hearing "the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now".

That same year, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Since then climate science has become ever more sophisticated -- IPCC reports detail in ever-greater urgency the pace of warming, while scientists can now say whether a particular deadly heatwave, storm or wildfire was amplified by climate change.

But this greater knowledge has been met with industry efforts to sow public confusion about the effects of fossil fuel pollution.

"It's a long history of scientists battling to get this out there. Just stop fighting us," said Andrew.

- 'Not fiction' -

Bell, who co-runs the climate charity Possible, welcomed the recognition of Foote as part of that history.

But she said there are "an awful lot of other voices that have been lost along the way".

For example, she said the colonial era was in some ways a period of "unlearning" -- when European settlers brutalised indigenous peoples and disregarded their knowledge.

Now it is widely recognised that these communities are often far better at managing their lands sustainably.

With the evidence of climate change and record temperatures now impossible to ignore, Bell said decades of scientific endeavour has armed us with both knowledge and technology -- "we have a lot of the solutions".

But societies must now act to avert the most catastrophic effects.

"It is especially hard to admit that the entire responsibility rests on the people who are active in this decade: that everything depends on us, here, now," said Spencer Weart in his history of climate change science.

"It's as if we have woken up in a science-fiction movie. But it's not fiction, it's physics."


Related Links
Climate Science News - Modeling, Mitigation Adaptation


Thanks for being there;
We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain.

With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords.

Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year.

If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter
$5+ Billed Monthly


paypal only
SpaceDaily Contributor
$5 Billed Once


credit card or paypal


CLIMATE SCIENCE
Climate past provides tipping point 'early warning': study
Paris (AFP) July 30, 2021
Abrupt disruptions to Earth's climate thousands of years ago that caused extreme sea-level rise and mass ice cap melting can serve as an early warning system for today's planetary tipping points, according to new research. Climate tipping points - which are irrevocable over centuries or longer - are thresholds past which large and rapid changes to the natural world may occur. They include looming catastrophes such as the melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and West Antarctica, which cont ... read more

Comment using your Disqus, Facebook, Google or Twitter login.



Share this article via these popular social media networks
del.icio.usdel.icio.us DiggDigg RedditReddit GoogleGoogle

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Russia launches Nauka module to space station after years of delay

Blue Origin's first crewed flight minted four new astronauts

World's richest man Jeff Bezos blasts into space

With the HUMANS project, a message that space is for everyone

CLIMATE SCIENCE
US watchdog upholds SpaceX's Moon lander contract

NASA performs field test of 3D imaging system for descent and landing

Lift off for UK spaceflight as regulations passed

SpaceX to launch NASA's Europa Clipper on Falcon Heavy rocket in 2024

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Science in motion for ExoMars twin rover

Aerial Scouting of 'Raised Ridges' for Ingenuity's Flight 10

China's Mars rover travels 585 meters on red planet

InSight mission: Mars unveiled

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Shanxi company helps astronauts keep fit in space

How Chinese astronauts stay healthy in space

China's five-star red flag flies proudly on red planet

China's Commercial Space Industry

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Inmarsat unveils the communications network of the future

Space company in search for professionals

Funding partnerships launch the UK-Australia Space Bridge

Space, the final frontier for billionaire Richard Branson

CLIMATE SCIENCE
'Metaverse': the next internet revolution?

Water as a metal - detected at BESSY II

Redwire to demonstrate In-Space Additive Manufacturing on ISS for Lunar operations

Let's face the liquid-liquid interface

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Galileo Project to search for ET artifacts in galactic space

From the sun to the stars: A journey of exoplanet discovery begins

ALMA images moon-forming disk around alien world

Planetary shields will buckle under stellar winds from their dying stars

CLIMATE SCIENCE
Hubble finds first evidence of water vapor on Ganymede

NASA Awards Launch Services Contract for the Europa Clipper Mission

Juno tunes into Jovian radio triggered by Jupiter's volcanic moon Io

Ride with Juno as it flies past Jupiter and Ganymede









The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2024 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. All articles labeled "by Staff Writers" include reports supplied to Space Media Network by industry news wires, PR agencies, corporate press officers and the like. Such articles are individually curated and edited by Space Media Network staff on the basis of the report's information value to our industry and professional readership. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Statement Our advertisers use various cookies and the like to deliver the best ad banner available at one time. All network advertising suppliers have GDPR policies (Legitimate Interest) that conform with EU regulations for data collection. By using our websites you consent to cookie based advertising. If you do not agree with this then you must stop using the websites from May 25, 2018. Privacy Statement. Additional information can be found here at About Us.