"This image of our planet is the closest we get to a real-time view of how carbon dioxide builds up in our atmosphere."
"I like to think the French physicist Joseph Fourier appreciated the irony that he, of all people, was the one who discovered the greenhouse effect. Here was a man who kept his Paris apartment tropically hot, who wrapped himself in blankets and wore an overcoat even in summer — a man who, in short, usually felt cold. Yet his calculations showed that Earth was in fact far warmer than it ought to be.
It was the 1820s. Fourier, in his fifties and already a renowned scientist, decided to estimate the Earth’s temperature purely from scientific principles. He took the amount of sunlight that warms the Earth and then subtracted off the amount of energy the planet radiates back to space. He came up with a temperature some 30 degrees Celsius — more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit — colder than our actual planet.
Fourier knew the Earth was retaining extra heat, but he didn’t know how. It fell to later generations of scientists to reveal that certain gases, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, block some of the infrared light that the planet radiates back to space. When these gases build up in the atmosphere, Earth temporarily emits less energy than it absorbs from the sun. To restore the energy balance, the planet warms."
Harry Stevens reports for the Washington Post February 1, 2024.
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