Three pioneers who predicted climate change | BBC Ideas

[@bbcideas]

If you enjoyed this animation, you might like this one too - it follows the incredible story of Severn Cullis-Suzuki who gave a famous speech to the UN about environmental destruction when she was just 12: kzbin.info/www/bejne/enLciZiOi6uGmNk&t

[@bbcideas]

And you can watch our full playlist of videos about climate change and the environment here: kzbin.info/aero/PLMrFM-P68Wh7CywWU7fRF4kxy6ezbPDTB

[@azury3358]

@@bbcideas thanks I have

[@mailwormhole]

I like that at 2:03 they describe climate change as resultant from burning fossil fuels and illustrate this in the cartoon with a nuclear facility.

[@vaageesh6054]

And despite all this , people still don't seem to take Climate Change seriously

[@mailwormhole]

Doubting scientific conclusions is a serious part of science. A person designing a scientific process on water in the arctic might conclude water is a solid. Future experiments with controls for temperature would have different and more accurate results.

[@QT5656]

@@mailwormhole Not really, doubt is just a feeling. Science relies on experiments, gathering and analysing new evidence, observations, or data. Generally experiments are designed so that existing hypotheses can be disproved. Results are critically evaluated with due caution and context. It is not the same as simply being doubtful or contrarian. The evidence that CO2 is crucial to driving planetary climate change is extensive. There are many ways that it could be disproven but the "skeptics" have failed again and again to do so. All they offer is a Smörgåsbord of long debunked talking points based on lies and wishful thinking. They use to argue it wasn't warming, then that the warming had paused, then that its warming but it isn't CO2, now they claim that the warming is a good thing. Your reductive strawman analogy isn't very helpful.

[@lucasmancini2]

Im only 27 years old, and i remember as a child, almost no one belived in clima change, keeling was holding alot of presentations at that time. But of course most people don’t care about an old guy talking about some weird gases.. i remember my teacher told me; clima change is bullshitt and i shouldnot waste my time with such things.. i also remember how we had snow every winter, for a long time, sometimes 3-6 feet high. Now we are happy if we do get snow. Tornados was something i knew from tv from the states, here in europe never. Well that’s over, they are here.. we are so f***ng far in to the clima change to just slowly realize that it is happening.. if we as species adapt so slowly we will become extinct one day..

[@QT5656]

I'm 45 years old and I remember many people believing climate change. Since the 1980s the petrochem industry have done an impressive job of generating doubt with bad faith talking points.

[@toni7288]

Full script: We‘ve know about the idea of the greenhouse effect since the 1820s, but it was Eunice Foote - a woman's tight activist - who first showed how it could actually work. In 1856, she used an air pump to fill glass cylinders with different gases and then tested the effect of sunlight on them. On was carbon dioxide, CO2. „The receiver containing the gas became itself much heated and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling…“. Foote‘s experiment suggested that CO2 and water vapor trap heat more than other gases do and the potential effects on our climate began to emerge. „An Atmosphere of that gas, would give our earth a high temperature“. The year she submitted her findings to an American scientific society. At their conference she wasn't able to take questions directly because someone else presented her work for her and it wasn't published in the proceedings of the society. Another journal did end up publishing her paper, but it went largely unnoticed. 3 years later Irish physicist John Tyndall did more complex experiments, finding other greenhouse gases that trap heat. He went on to become one of the founding figures of climate science. Nobody knows if he'd read Eunice Foote‘s paper, but his won didn't mention her or her glass cylinders at all. No pictures of Foote have survived, and her contribution remained buried for 150 years - only coming to light by chance in 2010, when a retired geologist discovered a citation of her work in an antique science annual. Guy Stewart Callendar was a steam engineer by day and an avid collector of climate data in his spare time. Buy the 1930s, he was collecting temperature readings from 147 weather stations around the world. No-one had ever collated the data like this before, and when he compared his temperature readings to historic measurements of CO2, he discovered a clear pattern. Callendar saw that not only was climate change happening, it was at least partly down to the burning of fossil fuels. In 1938, Callendar presented his findings to a scientific body but the idea that we humans could influence something as huge as the earths climate was still, for many, too hard to believe. It wasn't until after the second wold war that the effect of human activity on global warming - the „Callendar effect“ - was proved right. In 1958, chemist Charles Keelings colleagues were studying the relationship between ocean acidity and carbon dioxide. Until then, it had been thought that the oceans quickly absorb most CO2, taking it out of the atmosphere, but that didn't appear to be true. Keeling had a hunch that scientists had been underestimating how much of the gas was actually over our heads. „I was telling these people that the whole field was pretty badly screwed up.“ Atmospheric CO2 readings had been taken for decades, but the data was unreliable. Keeling was convinced he could do better, and looked for a spot that was as far as possible from the pollution of cities and industry. He went to the middle of the north pacific, 4,000 meters above sea level, to the huge active volcano of Mauna Loa, in Hawaii. „If you had to have picked a spot anywhere, which would have given a representation of the whole world with one single site, Mauna Loa Observatory is probably about the best choice.“ His new data proved two things. Firstly, it showed that CO2 goes up and down with seasons. But if you zoom out from these „saw‘s teeth“ you can see the second thing that keeling proved - atmospheric CO2 was increasing year on year. Keeling began plotting his readings on a graph, and the ominous upward-curving line - the „Keeling Curve“ - was born. But the Mauna Loa project faced challenges. Equipment broke down and it struggled to secure funding. It was only through sheer perseverance that the observatory kept taking its readings. Keeling was eventually awarded a national medal of science for his work, and today, Mauna Loa is still the worlds benchmark site for measuring CO2. Its now more than a 160 years since Eunice Foote suggested the cause of global warming, more than 80 years since Guy Callendar demonstrated the planet was warming because of human activity, and more than 60 years since Charles Keeling showed CO2 was rising at an alarming rate. And here we are...

[@azury3358]

Way above their age Such an insperation

[@bbcideas]

Thanks for watching! So glad to hear you found it an inspiration!

[@zoephin6205]

@@bbcideas Somehow you missed the fact that 1) Fourier himself debunked his own idea of the greenhouse effect. Adding more layers of glass did NOT increase the temperature at the surface. The GH effect claims that GHGs raise surface temperature. This did not happen. People should spend more time looking at Fourier's experimental conclusions rather than celebrating his HYPOTHESIS. 2) Eunice Foot's experiments showed that CO2 was a more powerful IR absorbing gas than Water Vapor. This is completely incorrect. Tyndall got the right result. We shouldn't credit people who got wrong results. Have a good day.

[@zoephin6205]

@@bbcideas 3) A glass container filled with Argon (a non-GHG) gets even hotter than CO2! A glass container filled with Krypton (a non-GHG) gets even hotter than Argon!

[@Glorpusflorpus]

Shout out to Mr.Westfall from Sonora High.

[@ketanbende4622]

Even after all these years we are struggling to contain the rise of this massive problem. Tells how serious we are with regards to this problem. No wonder, humans are suffering the wrath of nature (not necessarily COVID 19) for meddling too much

[@gamingtonight1526]

Both. What we are doing to the environment also causes pandemics.

[@gamingtonight1526]

Notice the "saw line" goes to 420ppm of C02, whereas it's actually at 440ppm. Little bit of smoke and mirrors here?

[@fractalnomics]

And why didn't it fall during the lockdown if humans the are 'the driving force'?

[@MariaMartinez-researcher]

@@fractalnomics It appears you didn't check anything before commenting. CO2 emissions did went down during 2020. They went straight up in 2021. What did you expect? That every CO2 emitting activity was going to stop? They didn't - also, lockdowns were fiercely resisted in many places. Did you expect that decades of CO2 excess accumulation would disappear in a few months? After all this time, and the increasing droughts, wildfires, floods, hurricanes, etc., do you still think that nothing unusual is going on?

[@QT5656]

@@MariaMartinez-researcher Exactly.

[@brd8764]

Predicting is creating unknown. James Bond minds. Agatha Christie. Creating and enjoying creating. Liking something makes people like life.

[@ninhtran374]

Zone.