Concentrating on CO₂: The Scandinavian and Arctic Measurements

Abstract

This article concerns atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) measurements made in Scandinavia and in the Arctic region before measurements started at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, in 1958. The CO2 hypothesis of climate change was one reason to measure atmospheric CO2 in the mid-1950s. The earlier history of CO2 measurements--for instance, the work of the chemist Kurt Buch--was also influential in this period. It is unclear when the CO2 hypothesis of climate change began to provide sufficient motivation for measurements, and the measurements may relate in a nonlinear way to the growth in popularity of the hypothesis. Discussions between meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby at Stockholm Högskola and scientists in America reveal how different kinds of CO2 studies varied with regard to precision.

The environment as seen through the life of a journal: Ambio 1972–2022

“…In the 1950s, anthropogenic climate change was not yet an ''issue'' at a societal level, barely even at a scientific level, but in the meteorological research environment of Stockholm University it was already since many years on the way to becoming one (Bohn 2011). Rossby wrote his prophetic words about climate change just before his sudden and all too early passing.…”

Epistemic geographies of climate change

“…2 Tarfala ‘became an internationally recognized field-based bulwark of climate scepticism’ (p. 247) which persisted among Stockholm glaciologists and geographers into the 1980s. Exercising no such ‘cult of local observations’ (p. 249), Rossby’s group, of which the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chair Bert Bolin was a part, turned their attentions instead to globally representative observations like those of the Mauna Loa CO 2 observatory, and to attempts to model the impacts of such observed changes on global climate (Bohn, 2011; Fleming, 2016). Myanna Lahsen (2013) makes related observations about the cultural histories of empirical, theoretical and computational climatology and their shaping of climate scepticism among US atmospheric scientists.…”

Historical geography III

“…But Ahlmann’s theory did not hold up against work by Stockholm meteorology then developing around research by Carl-Gustaf Rossby. Rossby’s theory posited that heat-trapping greenhouse gases explained climate change, and this view ascended in scientific circles in direct proportion to the institutional support that it received (see also Bohn, 2011). The narratives investigated by Sörlin show ‘the importance of broad science politics as well as local and disciplinary methods, traditions, and institutional trajectories in shaping attitudes among scientists to climate change’ (Sörlin, 2009: 237; see also Dörries, 2011).…”