Did Al Gore invent the idea of human-generated global warming?
A. No. It was the lesser known Arvid Hogbom who first suggested that humans might alter the climate by burning coal. It was the dawn of the 20th century and scientists of the time were competing to figure out what caused the ice ages. It had become well accepted that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exerted a powerful warming effect — and so it followed that a drop in carbon dioxide might lead to cooling. One theory was that carbon dioxide waxed and waned with volcanic activity — and this drove the cycle of ice ages. Hogbom, perhaps out of curiosity, decided to calculate how much additional carbon dioxide was being sent into the air from coal burning. He found to the shock of many that it was comparable to volcanoes. That was enough to persuade Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius to look into the matter. He calculated that if coal burning doubled atmospheric CO2, the global average temperature would rise by about 5 degrees Celsius — a little more than many climate scientists predict to
