Introduction to the Special Issue on Philosophy and Climate Science

摘要

In 1896, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius calculated the atmospheric cooling and heating effects of raising or lowering the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. In 1938, British Engineer Guy Callendar gathered evidence that both the temperature, and the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had been rising for several decades, and presented new evidence based on spectroscopy that CO_2 was a heat trapping gas in the atmosphere. But the concept of climate change induced by atmospheric CO_2 was largely ignored until at least the 1950s. The tide among scientists turned in 1960, when Charles Keating demonstrated unequivocally that atmospheric CO_2 was rising, and by 1975, global climate simulations of increasing sophistication had a growing group of scientists began to sound the alarm, with the United States National Research Council publishing a report, in 1979, which warned that "When it is assumed that the CO content of the atmosphere is doubled and statistical thermal equilibrium is achieved, the more realistic of the modeling efforts predict a global surface warming of between 2 and 3.5 ℃, with greater increases at high latitudes." By the mid 1980s, a scientific consensus had emerged that human-produced changes in the atmosphere posed a serious threat to the global security and prosperity in the form of the potential of those changes to wreak havoc on the planet's climate in both systematic and unpredictable ways.