Sunday, January 16, 2011

Well damn it all, it's the Callendar Effect after all


Hans Suess and Roger Revelle, in their pioneering work on CO2 exchange between the oceans and the atmosphere, referred to the greenhouse effect as the Callendar Effect

There is even a book, and the Callendar Effect is in Wikipedia


11 comments:

David B. Benson said...

Good. No umlauts and whatever the little o thing over the A is called.

Rocco said...

So Callendar Effect = Enhanced Greenhouse Effect? Hmm, could it be another NWO renaming conspiracy? :)

Anonymous said...

So when G&T write "Falsification of the Callendar Effect", will they claim that he never existed?

IceMouse

Brian Schmidt said...

Arrenhius Effect or bust! No Johnny-Come-Latelys allowed.

Jim Bouldin said...

Whoa Rabbit. A Wikipedia article is evidence of anything? Callendar is definitely NOT the guy who came up with the idea of the greenhouse effect, that's a certainty. It was already being referred to as "the CO2 hypothesis" at the turn of the century.

EliRabett said...

Go read the damn book Jim

Jim Bouldin said...

If I had it I'd read it Eli. The guy who wrote that book, James Fleming, has written a lot on climate science history, including a paper I just read in which he discusses the ideas and evidence that Chamberlin and Arrhenius put forth around the turn of the century. [Fleming, 2000, Stud. Hist. Phil. Mod. Phys., Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 293-308] Why people are so obsessed with changing the name of the greenhouse effect all of a sudden I really have no idea.

EliRabett said...

Naw, Eli was just pulling John Nelsen Gammon's leg. He is now up to part four on the "Tyndall" effect. Besides it offered the opportunity of doing a little historical reading. The Anders Ångström paper was lost, and the family was taking a lot of stick because dad got saturation wrong.

Anonymous said...

Oh come on guys. It's the Greenhouse Effect. Stop arguing. Callendar was way late in the game, and the fact that Revelle and Suess gave Callendar the credit is irrelevant. By the way, the "pioneering work" on CO2 by Revelle and Suess actually came to the wrong conclusion about the effect of oceans on anthropogenic CO2. The credit for that should go to Bolin and Eriksson, which came out a year later and made a very successful prediction of the future course of CO2, making use of aspects of ocean carbonate chemistry that were actually understood since the 1930's. This is all explained in "The Warming Papers." Revelle is still a major figure in the history of research on climate, but Revelle and Suess really shouldn't be getting credit for this one.

--Raypierre

EliRabett said...

Yes, Eli knows that, but SOMEBUNNY has to get an edge in against the "it's not a greenhouse effect" Nazis, and this was Eli's way.

Kevin McKinney said...

Well, "Callendar Effect" isn't bad, IMHO. Callendar wasn't the first, of course, but if he hadn't taken the subject up when he did, there's no knowing when the various strands of research would have eventually been drawn together.

And he was the first to demonstrate (or attempt to) a secular temperature trend in connection with CO2; the first (AFAIK, at least) to construct temperature timeseries for that purpose (complete with corrections for UHI, though he didn't call it that); and perhaps the first to attempt to deal with the oceanic carbon sink.

He was a bit of a mentor, too, having corresponded with both Plass and Keeling as they were developing their ideas. All in all, a very important link in the 'chain of scholarship.'