The past

When Svante Arrhenius published his paper in 1896 suggesting that by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere the temperature of the earth would be increased, he generated little interest. He used the idea proposed by Joseph Fourier that the earth was warmed by the trapping of heat by the atmosphere, much as in a greenhouse. Arvid Hogbom, a Swede, had pointed out that the amount of carbon dioxide released by humans burning coal was of the same order as the carbon added to the atmosphere from volcanoes and the like.

In scientific circles, the concept of trapping of heat by the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was not taken seriously until the absorption spectrum was able to be measured with fine enough resolution to show that the carbon dioxide lines did not lie right on top of the water absorption lines.

When Revelle and Suess (1957) calculated, on the prevailing knowledge, that most of the CO2 released by artificial fuel combustion was absorbed in the ocean, it seemed that there would be no problem. However this was not the case. A molecule of CO2 left the ocean nearly as often as one entered it, and it was the net flux of carbon dioxide that was important. This problem of stating that there is a large flux of carbon across the sea surface is still bedevilling us, and concepts of net flux needed to be clarified by Ametistova and Jones (2001).