Are the Dangers of Human-Caused Climate Change Real and Present?
The notion of human-caused global warming has its origins in late-nineteenth-century speculation about the causes of past climate shifts, especially the ice ages when large parts of North America and Europe were under kilometres of ice. Svante Arrhenius of Sweden argued that intermittent volcanic activity, and the injection of huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, had regulated retreats and advances of glaciations, but this theory has now been discarded. The Serbian Milutin Malenkovich’s early-twentieth-century calculations linking the glaciations to changing characteristics of the earth’s orbit around the sun is now in favour. Nevertheless, speculation linking potential global warming to the burning of fossil fuels, based on Arrhenius’ theory, continued through the middle twentieth century. During the 1960s and 1970s computer modelling was being developed to advance weather prediction. As they advanced, weather prediction models were adapted to crudely simulate climate,
