SVANTE ARRHENIUS: CO2 FORECASTS

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SVANTE ARRHENIUS

February 19, 1859
– October 2, 1927

Arhenius estimated that a doubling of CO₂ would cause a temperature rise of 5 degrees Celsius [1], recent values from IPCC place this
value (the Climate sensitivity) at between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees. What is remarkable is that through a combination of skill and luck he came within a factor of two of the IPCC estimate. His calculations were important only in a qualitative way in showing that this was a significant effect. Arrhenius expected CO₂ levels to rise at a rate given by emissions at his time. Since then, industrial carbon dioxide levels have risen at a much faster rate: Arrhenius expected CO₂ doubling to take about 3000 years; it is now generally expected to take about a century.

SVANTE AUGUST ARRHENIUS

Born February 19, 1859 Vik, Sweden

Died October 2, 1927 Stockholm, Sweden

Residence Sweden

Nationality Sweden

Field Physical chemist

Institution Royal Institute of Technology

Alma Mater University of Uppsala University of Stockholm

Doctoral Advisor Eric Edlund

Doctoral Students Oskar Benjamin Klein

Known for Arrhenius equation

Notable Prizes Nobel Prize for Chemistry
(1903)

Svante August Arrhenius (February 19,
1859 – October 2, 1927) was a Swedish chemist and one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. The Arrhenius equation and the lunar crater Arrhenius
are named after him.

Early years

Arrhenius was born at Vik (also spelled Wik or Wijk), near Uppsala,
Sweden, the son of Svante Gustav and Carolina Thunberg
Arrhenius. His father had been a land surveyor for Uppsala University, moving up to a supervisory
position. At the age of three, Arrhenius taught himself to read, despite his parents’
wishes, and by watching his father’s addition of numbers in his account books, became an arithmetical prodigy.

In later life, Arrhenius enjoyed using masses of data to discover mathematical
relationships and laws. At age 8, he entered the local cathedral school, starting in the fifth grade, distinguishing himself in physics and mathematics, and
graduating as the youngest and most able student in 1876.

At the University of Uppsala, he was unsatisfied with the chief instructor of physics
and the only faculty member who could have supervised him in chemistry, so he left to
study at the Physical Institute of the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm under the physicist Erik Edlund in 1881. His work specialized on the conductivities of electrolytes.
In 1884, based on this work, he submitted a 150-page dissertation
on electrolytic conductivity to Uppsala for the doctorate.
It did not impress the professors, and he received the lowest possible passing grade.
Later this very work would earn him the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry.

There were 56 theses put forth in the 1884 dissertation, and most would still be
accepted today unchanged or with minor modifications. The most important idea in the
dissertation was his explanation of the fact that neither pure salts
nor pure water is a conductor,
but solutions of salts in water are.

Arrhenius’ explanation was that in forming a solution, the salt dissociates into
charged particles (which Michael Faraday had given the
name ions many years earlier). Faraday’s belief had been that ions
were produced in the process of electrolysis; Arrhenius
proposed that, even in the absence of an electric current, solutions of salts contained
ions. He thus proposed that chemical reactions in solution were reactions between ions.
For weak electrolytes this is still believed to be the case, but modifications (by Peter J. W. Debye and Erich
Hückel) were found necessary to account for the behavior of strong electrolytes.

The dissertation was not very impressive to the professors at Uppsala, but Arrhenius
sent it to a number of scientists in Europe who were developing the new science of physical chemistry, such as Rudolf Clausius, Wilhelm
Ostwald, and J. H. van ‘t Hoff. They were far
more impressed, and Ostwald even came to Uppsala to persuade Arrhenius to join his
research team. Arrhenius declined, however, as he preferred to stay in Sweden for a while
(his father was very ill and would die in 1885) and had received
an appointment at Uppsala.

Middle period

Arrhenius next received a travel grant from the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which
enabled him to study with Ostwald in Riga (now in Latvia), with Friedrich
Kohlrausch in Würzburg, Germany,
with Ludwig Boltzmann in Graz, Austria, and with van ‘t Hoff in Amsterdam.

In 1889 Arrhenius explained the fact that most reactions
require added heat energy to proceed by formulating the concept of activation energy, an energy barrier that must be
overcome before two molecules will react. The Arrhenius
equation gives the quantitative basis of the relationship between the activation
energy and the rate at which a reaction proceeds.

In 1891 he became a lecturer at Stockholms Högskola
(now Stockholm University), being promoted to
professor of physics (with much opposition) in 1895, and rector in 1896.

He was married twice, to Sofia Rudbeck, (who bore him one son) from 1894 to 1896, and to Maria Johansson (who
bore him two daughters and a son), from 1905 onward.

In 1901 Arrhenius was elected to the Swedish Academy of
Sciences, against strong opposition. In 1903 he became the first
Swede to be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
In 1905, upon the founding of the Nobel Institute for Physical
Research at Stockholm, he was appointed rector of the
institute, the position where he remained until retirement in 1927.

Later years

Eventually, Arrhenius’ theories became generally accepted and he turned to other
scientific topics. In 1902 he began to investigate physiological problems in terms of
chemical theory. He determined that reactions in living organisms and in the test tube
followed the same laws. In 1904 he delivered at the university of California a course of
lectures, the object of which was to illustrate the application of the methods of physical
chemistry to the study of the theory of toxins and antitoxins, and which were published in
1907 under the title Immunochemistry. He also turned his attention to geology (the origin of ice ages), astronomy, physical
cosmology, and astrophysics, accounting for the birth
of the solar system by interstellar collision. He
considered radiation pressure as accounting for comets, the solar corona, the aurora borealis, and zodiacal
light.

He thought life might have been carried from planet to planet by the transport of spores, the theory now known as panspermia.
He thought of the idea of a universal language, proposing a modification of the English language.

In an extension of his ionic
theory Arrhenius proposed definitions for acids and bases, in 1884. He believed that acids were substances which
produce hydrogen ions in solution and that bases were substances which produce hydroxide
ions in solution.

In his last years he wrote both textbooks and popular books, trying to emphasize the
need for further work on the topics he discussed.

In September, 1927, he came down with an attack of acute intestinal
catarrh, died on October 2, and
was buried in Uppsala.

Greenhouse effect as cause for ice ages

Svante Arrhenius developed a theory to explain the ice ages, and first formulated the idea
that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter
the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect (“On the Influence of
Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground“, Philosophical Magazine 1896(41): 237-76). He was influenced
by the work of others, including Joseph
Fourier‘s argument that the earth’s atmosphere
acted like the glass of a hot-house. Arrhenius used the infrared observations of the moon
by Frank Washington Very and Samuel Pierpont Langley at the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh to calculate the absorption of CO₂ and
water vapour. Using the just published Stefan’s
law he formulated his greenhouse law. In its
original form, Arrhenius’ greenhouse law reads as follows:

if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of
the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.

Which is still valid in the simplified expression by Myhre et al(1998).

delta F = a ln(C/C₀)

Arrhenius’ high absorption values for CO₂, however, met criticism by Knut Ångström in 1900, who published the first modern infrared spectrum of CO₂
with two absorption bands. Arrhenius replied strongly in 1901 (Annalen der Physik),
dismissing the critique altogether. He touched the subject briefly in a technical book
titled Lehrbuch der kosmischen Physik (1903). He later wrote Världarnas
utveckling (1906), German translation: Das Werden der Welten (1907), English
translation: Worlds in the Making (1908) directed at a general audience, where the
suggested that the human emission of CO₂ would be strong enough to prevent the
world from entering a new ice age, and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the
rapidly increasing population. From that, the hot-house theory gained more attention.
Nevertheless, until about 1960, most scientists dismissed the hot-house / greenhouse
effect as implausible for the cause of ice ages as Milutin Milankovitch had presented a mechanism using orbital changes of the earth.

Arhenius estimated that a doubling of CO₂ would cause a temperature rise of
5 degrees Celsius [1], recent values from IPCC place this
value (the Climate sensitivity) at between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees. What is remarkable is that
through a combination of skill and luck he came within a factor of two of the IPCC
estimate. His calculations were important only in a qualitative way in showing that this
was a significant effect. Arrhenius expected CO₂ levels to rise at a rate given
by emissions at his time. Since then, industrial carbon dioxide levels have risen at a
much faster rate: Arrhenius expected CO₂ doubling to take about 3000 years; it
is now generally expected to take about a century.

References

Svante Arrhenius, 1884, Recherches sur la conductivité galvanique des électrolytes,
doctoral dissertation, Stockholm, Royal Publishing House, P.A. Norstedt & Söner, 89
pages.

Svante Arrhenius, 1896a, Ueber den Einfluss des Atmosphärischen Kohlensäurengehalts
auf die Temperatur der Erdoberfläche, in the Proceedings of the Royal Swedish
Academy of Science, Stockholm 1896, Volume 22, I N. 1, pages 1–101.

Svante Arrhenius, 1896b, On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the
Temperature of the Ground, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine
and Journal of Science (fifth series), April 1896. vol 41, pages
237–275.

Svante Arrhenius, 1901a, Ueber die Wärmeabsorption durch Kohlensäure, Annalen
der Physik, Vol 4, 1901, pages 690–705.

Svante Arrhenius, 1901b, Über Die Wärmeabsorption Durch Kohlensäure Und Ihren
Einfluss Auf Die Temperatur Der Erdoberfläche. Abstract of the proceedings of the
Royal Academy of Science, 58, 25–58.

Svante Arrhenius, 1903, Lehrbuch der Kosmischen Physik, Vol I and II, S. Hirschel
publishing house, Leipzig, 1026 pages.

Svante Arrhenius, 1908, Das Werden der Welten, Academic Publishing House,
Leipzig, 208 pages.