Svante Arrhenius’ (1896) models of climate change lacked modern climate theory and data but, by making reasonable extrapolations from what was known of physics, still managed to predict (within 2°C) how much warming would result from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere (Crawford 1997).
This makes it sound like we’ve now observed how much warming resulted from a doubling of CO2, and Arrhenius’s estimate was within 2°C of the measured value. That is not the case. Rather, we have models that give a range of estimates that’s a few degrees wide (which makes “within 2°C” harder to interpret). So you’ll want to say something like, “still managed to be within 2°C of typical modern estimates” (if that’s accurate).
Please nobody use this as an excuse to discuss global warming.
Arrhenius expected CO2 doubling to take about 3000 years; it is now estimated in most scenarios to take about a century.
Good man with atmospheric physics, not so great at predicting the fossil fuel economy :P
Anyhow, Arrhenius’ estimate being close involved plenty of luck, with bad spectroscopic data canceling out the effects of simplifications—he could have been a factor of 4 off it it had gone the other way. So if we’re to take the lesson of Arrhenius, the recipe for predictive success is not cognitive science, it’s “use solid physical simplifications to make estimates that are correct within a factor of 4, and then get remembered for the ones that wind up being close.”
Of course, that works better when you have physical simplifications to make.
This makes it sound like we’ve now observed how much warming resulted from a doubling of CO2, and Arrhenius’s estimate was within 2°C of the measured value. That is not the case. Rather, we have models that give a range of estimates that’s a few degrees wide (which makes “within 2°C” harder to interpret). So you’ll want to say something like, “still managed to be within 2°C of typical modern estimates” (if that’s accurate).
Please nobody use this as an excuse to discuss global warming.
ETA an amusing fact from Wikipedia:
Good man with atmospheric physics, not so great at predicting the fossil fuel economy :P
Anyhow, Arrhenius’ estimate being close involved plenty of luck, with bad spectroscopic data canceling out the effects of simplifications—he could have been a factor of 4 off it it had gone the other way. So if we’re to take the lesson of Arrhenius, the recipe for predictive success is not cognitive science, it’s “use solid physical simplifications to make estimates that are correct within a factor of 4, and then get remembered for the ones that wind up being close.”
Of course, that works better when you have physical simplifications to make.