L2p1

This video segment presents some history of science, in particular the discovery that human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are causing global warming. For a fuller account please read Spencer Weart's book, The Discovery of Global Warming. This segment has four major points. Number one, Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Number two, Most of the carbon dioxide released by human activities remains in the atmosphere. Number three, atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures are rising. And last, number four, Human activities are responsible for some of the observed climate changes. The first person to call attention to modern trends in climate and carbon dioxide was a guy named Guy Stewart Callendar. He was an engineer who studied the properties of steam and steam engines. But his father had invented a key instrument in modern weather stations, the platinum resistance thermometer. Consequently Guy Stewart Callendar which scour the temperature records of weather stations around the world in his spare time. I imagine many of you have similar hobbies. His calculations first published in 1938 indicated the Earth had warmed about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit during the period from 1910 to 1930. This warming was correlated with the rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, Callendar was considered to be an amateur who was encroaching on the domain of licensed climatologists. Needless to say, his work was not warmly received by this professional group, most of whom believed that temperature records from around the world were so variable that these numbers could be manipulated to support nearly any conclusion. Also they believed that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would fluctuate literally with the wind as local sources of carbon di oxide such as factories and local sinks such as forests influenced every sample. Only after an additional twenty years of research did professional climatologists finally embrace the conclusions of Callendar. Key elements of this additional research were inspired by Godzilla. Yes, really, Godzilla, the fictional giant, fire-breathing reptile. Japan has suffered several nuclear disasters, beginning with the nuclear detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 that brought world war two to a close. [sound of bomb exploding] [silence] A nuclear bomb test in the Pacific contaminated the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel in 1954. Later that year Godzilla, a monster supposedly created through exposure to radioactivity, stared in her first feature film. [sound and music from movie clip]