It’s lunchtime and I’m in a storytelling mood. Who wants to hear about an ancestor of Greta Thunberg, who did win a Nobel, back in 1903? He was a key figure in the history of the climate crisis, though his prize was nothing to do with that...
Svante Arrhenius was born in 1859, in Vik, in the South East corner of Sweden where his father managed land for the University of Uppsala. 
There are stories about him being a bit of a prodigy - teaching himself to read aged 3, etc. But there are always stories like that about famous scientists. What we do know is that he did well at school and went on to study maths, chemistry and physics at the university.
He pioneered work combining physics and chemistry. His 1883 PhD thesis was given a v low mark at first cos scientists at the time couldn’t understand the interdisciplinary nature of his research, but by 1903 he’d bagged a Nobel and international acclaim for his efforts.
Back in the late 19th C, climate change wasn’t something most people worried about. They’d worked out this thing we now the greenhouse effect (1830s), and knew carbon was a greenhouse gas (1850s). But they weren’t worried.
Arrhenius’ friends at the Stockholm Physics society were, at the time, really into something called “cosmic physics” which involved fun new ways of collecting data like balloon trips to the North Pole. (I used to have a pic of this but can’t find it on my phone. Sorry)
Anyway these cool kids in cosmic physics had been fighting over the causes of what we’d now call Ice Ages, and Arrhenius picked up older work on global temperatures as something he could bring to the society.
Plus in 1896 he was going through a difficult divorce and apparently he found temperature calculations soothing. (Sidenote: he had married one of his students. Academics: don’t do this, it ends in tears and temperature calculations)
For months and months he’d scribble away with his pencil calculating the atmospheric moisture and radiation entering and leaving the Earth for each zone of latitude.
At first, he looked at what’d happen if we had less carbon in the atmosphere. A “return of the deadly glaciers” was much more worrying to people at the time. They wondered if volcanoes stopped erupting, maybe it’d get really cold.
Arrhenius gave a mathematical basis to these concerns. His calculations suggested that halving the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would cool the world by 5 degrees C. Brrr.
Then a colleague of Arrhenius, Arvid Högbom, suggested what was, for the time, a pretty weird new idea. What about all these new factories that had sprung up over the past century? What about man-made carbon emissions?
Arrhenius ran the maths, just as he had run the maths imagining a lack of CO2, and calculated that doubling carbon dioxide emissions could raise the Earth’s temperature by five or even six degrees Celsius.
Still, Arrhenius wasn’t too worried. He figured this amount of CO2 would take thousands of years to produce, and we’d work something out before then. I guess he both underestimated humanity and overestimated it.
There were, at the time, good scientific reasons to doubt Arrhenius’ work. The data wasn’t that great back then, and some lab measurements seemed to refute the idea. Other scientists argued convincingly the oceans would soak the CO2 up.
And this Arrhenius dude, he always had weird new work going on. And temperature calculations weren’t his only side project – he also had idea about life on earth coming from seeds from outer space. He was just a Prof playing around with ideas and numbers to see what came out.
When Arrhenius came back to this issue, later in life, he got a bit more worried. He could see the CO2 emissions ratcheting up. Still, most scientists dismissed him.
... what happened next is another story. You’ll have to wait for the book.
