Did joseph fourier, the man who dicovered green house gas, later deny global warming?

Question

i heard that he later believed that global waring was not a big deal or wasnt true or something on that side.please help im doin an essay about his issue

Answer 1

I think you may be confusing Fourier with Arrhenius.

Arrhenius wrote about the greenhouse effect but didn't think atmospheric CO2 levels would get this high for a thousand years.

Answer 2

Sorry Bob, you need to correct the statement about EVERY scientific org supporting. More to come as the evidence against AGW mounts.

http://www.dailytech.com/Myth+of+Consens...

Answer 3

Sorry CrazyCon, you need to correct the statement about correcting the statement EVERY scientific org supporting.

Read the red text now added to this silly paper.

http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters...

Answer 4

No.

In 1824, Joseph Fourier determined that the Earth would be far colder if it lacked an atmosphere.  It wasn't until 1859, when John Tyndall discovered that atmospheric gases blocked infrared radiation.  Then in 1989, Svante Arrhenius made the first published calculation of global warming possibly being caused by human emissions of CO2.

Early scientists weren't overly concerned about global warming, because they never imagined humans would EVER emit as much as we are now emitting.

Answer 5

No.  He couldn't for TWO reasons:

First, he died May 16, 1830.

Second, global warming is proven scientific fact.  EVERY major scientific organization has issued an official statement that this is real, and mostly caused by us.  The National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Association, etc.

It appears that you've come across a lot of REALLY bad information from dubious sources.

Answer 6

No, he couldn't have denied the current science because none of it was available to him at that time.

The history of climate change science as docuemnted by the American Institute of Physics:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/summa...

On today's scientific consensus:

http://norvig.com/oreskes.html

The consensus was quantified in a Science study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes (Dec. 2004) in which she surveyed 928 scientific journal articles that matched the search [global climate change] at the ISI Web of Science. Of these, according to Oreskes, 75% agreed with the consensus view (either implicitly or explicitly), 25% took no stand one way or the other, and none rejected the consensus.

Benny Peiser attempted to replicate the study, and found 34 articles that "reject or doubt" the consensus view--that is, 3% rather than the 0% that Oreskes found in her sample. Note that Peiser has altered Oreskes' original category from "reject" to "reject or doubt" so it is logically possible that both are correct. Also, there were several other differences between the studies: Peiser included "all documents" in the database rather than just scientific articles, and he included Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities as well as Sciences. Peiser was kind enough to share the 34 articles that he says reject or doubt. A discussion of the 34 argues that probably two to five of them should count, and the two best examples are editorials, not scientific publications (which is probably why they were not included in Oreskes' study).

When faced with a controversy like this, the great thing is that you can do your own research. If you suspect Oreskes or Peiser (or both) might be biased, you can look at the data yourself.

So that's what I did. Of the 34 articles, I would say that #10 and #27 clearly reject the consensus, but they are editorials, not scientific papers (and #27 is from an oil industry trade association). #1 and #6 doubt, but again are not scientific papers. #7, #17, #31 and maybe #22 doubt, and #15 says that both greenhouse gases and solar activity are roughly equal contributers to warming; so I counted it as "doubt." So overall I would say that Oreskes is correct; that Peiser has not shown a peer-reviewed scientific paper that clearly rejects the consensus. I would also say that Peiser is correct in that he found at least 4 papers that place some doubt on some of the premises of the consensus, but he is widely wrong in claiming 34. Update (June 2007): Peiser has backed off his claims, and now says there is actually only one out of the 34 papers that rejects the consensus, and that one is an editorial, not a scientific paper (and therefore was not included in the Oreskes study).

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It's amazing that people waste so much time denying something so well documented.