Sir, – In his piece on ignoring climate change warnings (“All my life there have been climate warnings. We’re ingenious at ignoring them”, Opinion, August 15th), Fintan O’Toole uses such warnings made in his lifetime to lament inadequate government action. Leaving Certificate chemistry students will be familiar with the acid-base theory of Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish chemist and Nobel Prize winner. They may be less familiar with Arrhenius’s contribution to the discussion of the enhanced greenhouse effect and global warming. The link between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the earth had been established before Arrhenius’s time, but he was the first to try to quantify it. The task was made more complicated by the fact that other gases, particularly water vapour, also have a greenhouse effect. Having carried out thousands of calculations, Arrhenius published his results in 1896. Although rough by today’s standards, these showed a numerical link between carbon dioxide levels and the earth’s surface temperature. Modern work has provided more accurate results. Arrhenius realised that the widespread burning of coal was pumping atmospheric carbon dioxide above the levels needed to keep the Earth habitable. It was in later work that he suggested the likelihood of global warming. – Yours, etc,
TERENCE WHITE,
Waterford.