A surveyor's son and a child prodigy who was reading and calculating by age three, Svante August Arrhenius was a brilliant student throughout his education in Uppsala, Sweden, at the elementary, high school, and university levels. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Uppsala University, Arrhenius traveled in 1881 to Stockholm, where, at the Physical Institute of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, he began his lifelong interest in the conductivities of such electrolytes as sodium chloride. Besides an experimental section dealing with electrolytic conductivities, his doctoral dissertation contained a theoretical portion in which he proposed the revolutionary idea that, in very dilute solutions, electrolytes are present as charged atoms or groups of atoms (called ions). Incredulous over this radical theory, his examiners passed him but "without any praise," the lowest category.

After receiving his doctorate in 1884, Arrhenius studied and conducted research with some influential European scientists who were establishing the new field of physical chemistry, and he developed equations describing how rates of chemical reactions increased with temperature. His academic career comprised increasingly prestigious positions at Uppsala University (1884-1891), Stockholm University (1891-1905), and the Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry (1905-1927). In 1903, he became the first Swede to win the Nobel Prize, which conferred official approval on his electrolytic theory of dissociation. Although his most important contributions were in physical chemistry, he also developed interesting ideas in immunochemistry, regarding the equilibrium between toxins and antitoxins, and geology, regarding the cause of ice ages. In exobiology, his theory of panspermia posited that cosmic microorganisms originated life on Earth. After the end of an early two-year marriage, which produced a son, he married Maria Johansson, with whom he had two daughters and a son. He died in Stockholm in 1927 but was buried in Uppsala, the city of his youth and early accomplishments.

In his famous 1896 paper on climate change, Arrhenius acknowledged the influence of such precursors as Joseph Fourier and John Tyndall. In 1825, Fourier had grasped that Earth's atmosphere acts "like the glass of a hot-house," letting through high-energy (ultraviolet) radiation but retaining low-energy (infrared) radiation. In 1859, Tyndall, using spectrophotometry, discovered that certain gases, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2), had the power to absorb ultraviolet rays. Arrhenius became interested in this phenomenon because of his curiosity about the cause of the ice ages. Earth's ice sheets had expanded when the global temperature was low and retreated when it was high, and Arrhenius speculated that changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations might explain these variations.

In 1895, Arrhenius presented a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society titled "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground." He was not a climatologist, but he had the ability to take the data collected by others and forge a mathematical model of how even small amounts of "carbonic acid" (CO2) could affect global temperatures. For example, he calculated that a modest decline in atmospheric CO2 would be sufficient to lower global temperatures by 4œ to 5œ Celsius, sufficient to cause the spread of ice sheets between the 40th and 50th northern parallels. On the other hand, particularly in his later writings, he understood that doubling concentrations of atmospheric CO2 would lead surface temperatures to rise by about 5œ Celsius.

In Arrhenius's view, atmospheric CO2 was due to "volcanic exhalations," organic decay, the burning of coal, and the decomposition of carbonates. He also understood that greater human populations with increased energy use would result in higher levels of atmospheric CO2, with concomitant global warming. He did not see such warming as detrimental, however, for he believed that warmer climates would lead to better harvests and fewer famines.

Some scientists found Arrhenius's calculations implausible, because they were based on a highly oversimplified model of the Earth's extremely complex atmosphere. Geologists rejected his theory as an explanation for the ice ages, since he was unable to find a satisfactory mechanism for the removal of so much CO2 from the atmosphere (later analyses of many ice cores falsified Arrhenius's theory). Other scientists were unconcerned about anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2, because they felt that oceans and plants would mitigate any CO2 buildup.

It was not until after World War II, when advanced technologies resulted in improved atmospheric data and larger and faster computers supported more rigorous mathematical models, that climatologists were better able to understand past, present, and future concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases. To many of these scientists, Arrhenius became an admired predecessor, especially when, during the 1970's and 1980's, CO2 was recognized as the key molecule in climate change. Like his theory of ionic dissociation, which was initially ridiculed then widely accepted, Arrhenius's theory of the influence of CO2 on global temperatures passed through a long period of rejection before it achieved the scientific consensus that has now become the basis of significant political actions.

Bibliography:

1)         Arrhenius, Svante. "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground." Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. 5th ser. 41 (April, 1896): 237-275

2)         Christianson, Gale E. Greenhouse: The Two-Hundred-Year Story of Global Warming. Washington, D.C.: Walker, 1999.

3)         Crawford, Elisabeth. Arrhenius: From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse Effect. Canton, Mass.: Science History, 1996.

4)         Fleming, James Rodger. "Global Environmental Change and the History of Science." In The Modern Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Vol. 5 in The Cambridge History of Science, edited by Mary Jo Nye. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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