Eliot Jacobson's Climate Work

Eliot Jacobson's Climate Blog is a worthwhile stop on the Internet Superhighway. Prof. Jacobson first came to my notice when I stumbled upon his discussion of the debris flows in Montecito, in my home town of Santa Barbara. As it turns out, Dr. Jacobson was formerly a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at UCSB, my alma mater. That was cool; but the main attraction was his graphs, representations of climate data. As a science educator, and for personal studies of tides, I have focused a great deal of attention on graphing. To emphasize the usefulness of graphs, I gave students pages of numbers that were at least perplexing and not easy to understand as numbers on a page alone. Graphs bring life to these pages of numbers, and sense. Jacobson is great at it.

His web page at https://climatecasino.net/, and a more recent compendium, I Jump, are worth visiting.

Early Bellweather of the Effect of CO2

Fossil fuel and profit extraction corporations knew relatively early of the effects of the burning of Fossil Fuels. Incredibly, those corporations and greedy barons continue to conceal or obfuscate the truth about Carbon Dioxide and other Greenhouse Gas emissions, taking advantage of the Supreme Court's decision that Corporations are persons, and can therefore contribute an unlimited amount to political campaigns. I was troubled to learn of work by scientists in the employ of fossil fuel centered corporations such as Exxon and Shell, and automobile manufacturers in the late 50s, showing the dire consequences of continued use of such fuels and automobiles driven by internal combustion engines, and that these corporations continued---and to a great extent continue to this day---to build a dynasty, on a foundation of deception of the public, and denial.

Even more remarkable is this document, linked below, written by the chemist Svante Arrhenius, in 1896. This pdf is prefaced by the following description:

Arrhenius’s paper is the first to quantify the contribution of carbon
dioxide to the greenhouse effect (Sections I-IV) and to speculate about
whether variations in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide
have contributed to long-term variations in climate (Section V).
Throughout this paper, Arrhenius refers to carbon dioxide as “carbonic
acid” in accordance with the convention at the time he was writing.

https://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf