In her article in The New Yorker, “Climate Change From A to Z: The stories we tell ourselves about the future”, Elizabeth Kolbert writes of the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who, on the eve of the 20th century, constructed the world’s first climate model.
Source: Supplied. Pamela Hellig, the consulting actuary at Insight Life Solutions.
According to his scarily accurate calculation, if the amount of carbon dioxide in the air were to double, global temperatures would rise between three and four degrees Celsius – pretty close to the 2.5 to four-degree increase predicted by the vastly more advanced climate models of today.
Kolbert writes: “Arrhenius thought that the future he had conjured would be delightful. ‘Our descendants,’ he predicted, would live happier lives ‘under a warmer sky’…It’s easy now to poke fun at Arrhenius for his sunniness. The doubling threshold could be reached within decades, and the results are apt to be disastrous.
“But who among us is any different? Here we all are, watching things fall apart. And yet, deep down, we don’t believe it.
Here we all are, watching things fall apart. And yet, deep down, we don’t believe it.
The human brain…
