The Age of Global Warming: A History (4 page)

Keynes went on to relate that he’d been told by Jevons’ son, an economist of some note, about how his father

held similar ideas as to the approaching scarcity of paper as a result of the vastness of demand in relation to the supplies of suitable material … He acted on his fears and laid in such large stores not only of writing paper, but also thin brown packing paper, that even today, more than fifty years after his death, his children have not used up the stock he left behind of the latter; though his purchases seem to have been more in the nature of speculation than for his personal use, since his own notes were mostly written on the backs of old envelopes and odd scraps of paper, of which the proper place was the waste-paper basket.
[38]

The rationality of Jevons’ response to his fear of resource depletion provides a contrast with the manner of his end. Ignoring the advice of his doctor that he avoid swimming, on holiday one August, Jevons drowned at sea.

In December 2007, NASA climate scientist James Hansen wrote to the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, sending a copy of his letter to the Queen. Britain, along with the United States and Germany, had contributed more carbon dioxide emissions per capita than any other country, Hansen claimed. Accompanying the letter was a short analysis of ‘basic fossil fuel facts’. There was a graphic totalling carbon dioxide emissions in the period 1751–2006. Coal was the single largest culprit. ‘Fully half of the excess CO
2
in the air today (from fossil fuels), relative to pre-industrial times, is from coal,’ the analysis said.
[39]

Is this a bad thing? As the economist Ronald Coase reminded us, to answer the question, we need to know the value of what is obtained as well as what is sacrificed in obtaining it.

Suppose that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum, a climate scientist had found a link between carbon dioxide emissions and global temperatures. And suppose the politicians of the time, invoking the precautionary principle that society should not do things that might involve unknown and unquantifiable risk, had followed the advice of today’s leading proponents of the global warming consensus. As a result, fossil fuel extraction would have been capped when Britain, the world’s leading coal producer, was mining less than twenty million tonnes of coal a year.

Posing the counter-factual provides a reality check. If today we implemented deep emission cuts, we cannot be sure how different the future would be in terms of economic development or how the climate of the future might be. But we can be fully confident that if the combustion of coal and other hydrocarbons had been severely restricted from the start of the nineteenth century, the economic take-off of the Industrial Revolution would not have happened: we would all be a lot poorer, our lives would be shorter and most of us would be earning our living working in the fields.

We can also see that the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were not outweighed by the costs of any resultant change in the climate, insofar as such changes can be attributed to industrialisation. The Maldives, or any other inhabited islands, did not sink beneath the oceans – if Darwin was right about the formation of coral atolls, they would not have anyway.
*
Neither is Bengal inundated. There hasn’t been a mass extinction of species due to climate change. It is quite possible that such changes in the climate as a result of industrialisation might, in fact, have been benign. Would a colder world have made us better off – with no coal, no electricity, no gas-fired central heating?

Around the time that Marx, Engels, Bastiat and Jevons were debating Malthus, a scientific breakthrough was occurring with the first experimental demonstration of the warming effect of carbon dioxide. Before it could happen, scientists needed to have identified and isolated carbon dioxide. And to do that, they had to discard one of chemistry’s most cherished theories.

It was in the 1750s, during the early stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, that Scottish chemist Joseph Black demonstrated what he called ‘fixed air’ had fundamentally different properties from ordinary atmospheric air. In the last three decades of the century, Joseph Priestley prepared and differentiated some twenty new ‘airs.’
[40]
At this point, scientific understanding encountered a block in the form of the phlogiston theory of combustion. This explained chemical changes caused by combustion in terms of a substance, phlogiston, being lost into the atmosphere.

The invention of phlogiston wouldn’t be the last time that scientists invented something to explain something else. In the nineteenth century, scientists invented ether because their materialistic assumptions required something through which light could undulate and electromagnetic occurrences happen. ‘If you do not happen to hold the metaphysical theory which makes you postulate such an ether,’ Whitehead wrote, ‘you can discard it. For it has no independent vitality.’
[41]

The overthrow of the phlogiston theory is a
locus classicus
in Thomas Kuhn’s
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
which describes how a scientific paradigm defines scientists’ field of study, then experiences a crisis to be supplanted by a new paradigm in a process similar to a political revolution. Kuhn challenged the idea that scientific knowledge proceeded through cumulative breakthroughs. The depreciation of historical fact and context was deeply ingrained in the ideology of the scientific profession, Kuhn wrote. Science still needed heroes, so it revised or forgot their works that did not fit the present. The outcome was ‘a persistent tendency to make the history of science look linear and cumulative’.
[42]
History, Kuhn argued, did not bear out this linear view of scientific progress: ‘Cumulative acquisition of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost non-existent exception to the rule of scientific development.’
[43]

The phlogiston theory broke down because it demanded greater and greater contortions to explain how the escape of a substance was consistent with the increased weight of what was left behind: phlogiston was incorporeal; it was the lightest known substance; it had negative weight.
[44]
This enabled the Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, who had established his oxygen theory of combustion seven years earlier, to administer the
coup de grâce
. In an extraordinary passage anticipating Popper’s theory of science, Lavoisier wrote in 1785:

Chemists have made phlogiston a vague principle, which is not strictly defined and which consequently fits all the explanations demanded of it. Sometimes it has weight, sometimes it has not; sometimes it is free fire, sometimes it is fire combined with an earth; sometimes it passes through the pores of vessels, sometimes they are impenetrable to it. It explains at once causticity and non-causticity, transparency and opacity, colour and the absence of colours. It is a veritable Proteus that changes its form every instant!
[45]

In 1800 Frederick William Herschel, a German astronomer settled in England, found that sunlight passing through a prism produced heat just beyond the red end of the visible spectrum. Herschel had stumbled upon infrared radiation. In the 1820s, Jean-Baptiste Fourier took Herschel’s discovery as the basis of his speculation that the Earth’s temperature could be ‘augmented by the interposition of the atmosphere’, because, as Fourier hypothesised, ‘heat in the state of light find less resistance in penetrating the air, than in re-passing into the air when converted into non-luminous heat’.
[46]
Had Fourier ‘discovered’ the greenhouse effect? The self-styled Newton of heat wasn’t sure. It was difficult to know how far the atmosphere influenced the average temperature of the globe. Fourier, a formidable mathematician, despaired of solving this problem: ‘We are no longer guided by a regular mathematical theory.’
[47]

Whether or not Fourier could be said to have discovered the greenhouse effect, it had not been demonstrated experimentally. In 1859, a few months before Charles Darwin published
The Origin of the Species
, the Irish scientist John Tyndall discovered that different gases absorb radiant heat of different qualities in different degrees. Provoked by an interest in glaciers and Alpinism, Tyndall set up a series of experiments to, as he said, put these questions to nature. After seven weeks of intense experimentation in his basement laboratory at the Royal Institution, Tyndall declared ‘the subject is completely in my hands’.
[48]

Three weeks later at a lecture attended by Prince Albert, Tyndall demonstrated his findings and concluded:

The bearing of this experiment upon the action of planetary atmospheres is obvious … the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.
[49]

Changes in the composition of the atmosphere, Tyndall wrote two years later, might have produced ‘all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal’.
[50]

Towards the end of the century, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius was also attracted to the idea that changes in the composition of the atmosphere could explain what caused successive glacial cycles. After a colleague pointed out to him that industrial processes were releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and would gradually alter its composition, Arrhenius did some calculations to quantify the effect. In 1896 Arrhenius produced a paper estimating that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase temperatures by 5-6
o
C.
[51]

As an explanation of glacial cycles, Arrhenius’ paper did not attract much scientific support. In the 1920s, the Serb mathematician Milutin Milanković proposed a competing theory relating glacial cycles to changes in the Earth’s orbit, which scientists found more plausible. By the end of the twentieth century, the Milanković cycles had fallen out of favour. Scientists now favoured theories that explained climate change in terms of changes in the atmosphere. 

A new paradigm held scientists in its grip.

*  In 1836, during the last year of his voyage on HMS Beagle, Darwin hypothesised that coral atolls had been formed by subsidence of the ocean bed of ‘extreme slowness.’ Witnessing the unrelenting power of the Indian Ocean, Darwin reflected that an island built of the hardest rock would ultimately be demolished by such irresistible forces. ‘Yet these low, insignificant coral islets stand and are victorious: for here another power, as antagonist to the former, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime one by one from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will this tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month.’ Charles Darwin,
Voyage of the Beagle
(first published 1839; Penguin 1989), p. 346 & 338.