180 Years of Atmospheric CO2 Gas Analysis by Chemical Methods

Ernst-Georg Beck

Energy & Environment, 2007, vol. 18, issue 2, 259-282

Abstract: More than 90,000 accurate chemical analyses of CO 2 in air since 1812 are summarised. The historic chemical data reveal that changes in CO 2 track changes in temperature, and therefore climate in contrast to the simple, monotonically increasing CO 2 trend depicted in the post-1990 literature on climate-change. Since 1812, the CO 2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942 the latter showing more than 400 ppm. Between 1857 and 1958, the Pettenkofer process was the standard analytical method for determining atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and usually achieved an accuracy better than 3%. These determinations were made by several scientists of Nobel Prize level distinction. Following Callendar (1938), modern climatologists have generally ignored the historic determinations of CO 2 , despite the techniques being standard text book procedures in several different disciplines. Chemical methods were discredited as unreliable choosing only few which fit the assumption of a climate CO 2 connection.

Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0958305X0701800206 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:engenv:v:18:y:2007:i:2:p:259-282

DOI: 10.1177/0958305X0701800206

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Energy & Environment
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().