JUST HOT AIR

摘要

Carbon dioxide is infamous today as the tiresome, unwanted by-product of just about everything we do. But working out its ill effects on our climate has itself been a lesson in tedium. It begins in the long northern winter of 1894. when the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius decided to distract himself from marital problems with some interminable quill-scratching. His aim was to find out whether reduced levels of CO_2 in the atmosphere might have caused past ice ages.