Und sie erwärmt sich doch! – Anmerkungen zur Klimaforschung: Von den ersten Schritten bis zum Nobelpreis für Physik

<p>Systematische wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen über das Klima der Erde begannen am Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts. Der erste, der in den 1820er Jahren die These aufstellte, dass die Atmosphäre wie eine Decke wirkt und die Erdoberfläche wärmer hält, als sie sein sollte, war Joseph Fourier. Er beschrieb, was wir heute als Treibhauseffekt bezeichnen. Eine experimentelle Untersuchung der Strahlungsabsorption von CO<sub>2</sub> wurde erstmals von Eunice Foote im Jahr 1856 durchgeführt. Drei Jahre später zeigte John Tyndall die Absorption infraroter Strahlung durch CO<sub>2</sub> und Wasserdampf. 1896 berechnete Svante Arrhenius die Auswirkung einer Verdoppelung des CO<sub>2</sub> auf die Lufttemperatur an der Oberfläche auf 5-6°C. In seinen Berechnungen von 1931 reduzierte Hurlburt diesen Anstieg auf 4 °C.</p> <p>Das erste umfassende Strahlungs-Konvektions-Modell für die Atmosphäre wurde 1967 von Manabe und Wetherald vorgestellt. Sie zeigten, dass eine Erhöhung des CO<sub>2</sub>-Gehalts in der Atmosphäre zu einer Erwärmung in der Troposphäre und einer Abkühlung in der Stratosphäre führt, wie die Beobachtungen zeigen. Manabe war die treibende Kraft bei der Entwicklung umfassender Modelle des Klimas und der Erdsysteme in den kommenden Jahrzehnten. Für seine Beiträge zum Verständnis des Klimasystems, insbesondere der Rolle von CO<sub>2</sub>, wurde er 2021 mit einem Viertel des Nobelpreises für Physik ausgezeichnet.</p> <p>Lange Zeit war nicht klar, wie man das Signal des steigenden atmosphärischen CO<sub>2</sub> in den Temperaturaufzeichnungen in den verrauschten Daten von Wetter- und Klimaschwankungen finden kann. Im Jahr 1976 schlug Hasselmann vor, dass Änderungen der langsamen Klimavariablen durch das weiße Rauschen des atmosphärischen Wetters verursacht werden. In den 1990er Jahren entwickelte er auch Methoden, um die "Fingerabdrücke" menschlicher Einflüsse auf die Klimavariabilität zu finden. Diese Methoden wurden intensiv auf die jüngsten Klimaintegrationen angewandt, die verschiedene Zukünfte des Klimas der Erde beschreiben. Auf der Grundlage dieser Anwendungen können wir nun feststellen, dass sich die Erde erwärmt - und wir daran schuld sind. Für seine Beiträge zum Verständnis der stochastischen Natur des Klimasystems und des menschlichen Fingerabdrucks auf die Klimaerwärmung wurde Klaus Hasselmann ein Viertel des Nobelpreises für Physik 2021 verliehen.</p>

Cosmic connections: James Croll's influence on his contemporaries and his successors

ABSTRACT This paper examines the astronomical theory of ice ages of James Croll (1821–1890), its influence on contemporaries John Tyndall, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin, and the subsequent development of climate change science, giving special attention to the work of Svante Arrhenius, Nils Ekholm, and G. S. Callendar (for the carbon dioxide theory), and Milutin Milanković (for the astronomical theory). Croll's insight that the orbital elements triggered feedbacks leading to complex changes – in seasonality, ocean currents, ice sheets, radiative forcing, plant and animal life, and climate in general – placed his theory of the Glacial Epoch at the nexus of astronomy, terrestrial physics, and geology. He referred to climate change as the most important problem in terrestrial physics, and the one which will ultimately prove the most far reaching in its consequences. He was an autodidact deeply involved in philosophy and an early proponent of what came to be called ‘cosmic physics’ – later known as ‘Earth-system science.’ Croll opened up new dimensions of the ‘climate controversy’ that continue today in the interplay of geological and human influences on climate.

The Arrhenius Equation

The Arrhenius equation describes the way in which the speed of a chemical reaction varies exponentially with temperature. This chapter describes the thermodynamics of chemical reactions, the complexity of chemical kinetics, their explanation in terms of atomic and molecular collisions and transitionary activated states, and the concepts of molecularity, reaction order and collision and reaction cross section. Svante Arrhenius was the son of an estate manager at Uppsala University. He was tremendously innovative scientifically, inventing the interdisciplinary fields of physical chemistry, the ionic theory of acids and bases, environmental science, global warming and immunochemistry. He had longstanding feuds with many, more conventional, scientists, particularly his doctoral supervisors, who nearly failed him because they thought his development of ionic theory was neither ‘proper’ physics nor ‘proper’ chemistry. He became Director of the Swedish Academy of Sciences Högskola in Stockholm, where he oversaw the initiation of the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Peace.

Modeling and Exploiting Microbial Temperature Response

Temperature is an important parameter in bioprocesses, influencing the structure and functionality of almost every biomolecule, as well as affecting metabolic reaction rates. In industrial biotechnology, the temperature is usually tightly controlled at an optimum value. Smart variation of the temperature to optimize the performance of a bioprocess brings about multiple complex and interconnected metabolic changes and is so far only rarely applied. Mathematical descriptions and models facilitate a reduction in complexity, as well as an understanding, of these interconnections. Starting in the 19th century with the “primal” temperature model of Svante Arrhenius, a variety of models have evolved over time to describe growth and enzymatic reaction rates as functions of temperature. Data-driven empirical approaches, as well as complex mechanistic models based on thermodynamic knowledge of biomolecular behavior at different temperatures, have been developed. Even though underlying biological mechanisms and mathematical models have been well-described, temperature as a control variable is only scarcely applied in bioprocess engineering, and as a conclusion, an exploitation strategy merging both in context has not yet been established. In this review, the most important models for physiological, biochemical, and physical properties governed by temperature are presented and discussed, along with application perspectives. As such, this review provides a toolset for future exploitation perspectives of temperature in bioprocess engineering.

La dynamique des températures et ses risques pour les populations de Djibouti dans le contexte du réchauffement global

La communauté scientifique est de plus en plus consensuelle sur le réchauffement climatique de notre planète, phénomène déjà envisagé en 1896 par le Suédois Svante Arrhénius. Le présent article se penche sur la question de la température dans la station de Djibouti sur les 60 dernières années dans le but d’interroger les effets du réchauffement climatique en zone hyperaride. Pour ce faire, nous nous sommes appuyé sur les températures enregistrées à la station de Djibouti aérodrome de 1961 à 2015 (plus d’un demi-siècle). Ces températures concernent les maximales, les minimales et les moyennes. En théorie, elles représentent plus de 62 000 valeurs de température. L’étude associe aussi les relevés de l’humidité relative de 2005 à 2015. L’étendue de la période d’étude devait permettre de dégager, si possible, des tendances. Pour une station extrêmement chaude et donc ne possédant pas de marge pour les hausses, la température moyenne n’a cessé de glisser vers le haut. Sur la période étudiée, on note un accroissement de près 2 °C passant de 29,7 à 31,5. Les températures maximales et minimales ont connu les mêmes modifications. Mais ce sont plus les températures minimales qui ont plus gagné des degrés, réduisant ainsi l’amplitude thermique. La température ressentie (en tenant compte de l’humidité relative) s’est établie à des valeurs représentant un danger certain surtout de mai à octobre. Les tendances à la hausse des températures et le maintien de fortes chaleurs, pendant la journée, tendent donc à rendre cette station de moins en moins vivable pour les êtres humains.

Richard Abegg and the Periodic Table

The German chemist Richard Wilhelm Heinrich Abegg (Fig. 13.1), was born on 9 January 1869 in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) (1). He received his PhD in 1891 from the University of Berlin for work in the field of organic chemistry done under the direction of August Hofmann. He switched to the new and rising field of physical chemistry immediately upon graduation, doing postdoctoral work in the laboratories of Wilhelm Ostwald at Leipzig and Svante Arrhenius at Stockholm, as well as serving as personal assistant to Walther Nernst at Göttingen. In 1897 Abegg was appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland). In 1909 he moved to the local Technischen Hochschule, where he remained until his untimely death on 3 April 1910 at age 41 in a ballooning accident near Koszalin in what is now modern-day Poland. As might be inferred from his association with Ostwald, Arrhenius, and Nernst, Abegg’s research interests quickly focused on the newly formulated theories of ionic dissociation and chemical equilibrium, where he is credited with contributing to an understanding of the theory of freezing point depression and with writing two popular introductory textbooks on the use of the ionic theory and equilibrium in reinterpreting various traditional areas of chemical synthesis and analysis (2, 3). With the discovery of the electron in 1897 Abegg soon became interested in its use to rationalize various electrochemical phenomena and in its possible implications for both the periodic table and chemical bonding. That year he published, in collaboration with Guido Bodländer, his theory of electroaffinity in which he postulated that electrochemical half-cell oxidation potentials could be used as a measure of an atom’s attraction for electrons and that this, in turn, could be qualitatively correlated with periodic trends (Fig. 13.2) in such properties as molecular polarity, solubility, and the tendency to form complex ions (4, 5).

Associating Physics and Chemistry to Dissociate Molecules

A case study of the Clausius-Williamson hypothesis sheds light on the development of the physical sciences during the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, Rudolf Clausius and Alexander William Williamson independently developed similar hypotheses at a time when physics and chemistry were beginning to be considered independent endeavors. Some thirty years later, after specialization took root, their names were associated; the two hypotheses became the hypothesis of Clausius-Williamson. How and why were these distinct investigations conducted in the 1850s unified in the 1880s? The current historiography addresses the Clausius-Williamson hypothesis as it is featured in subsequent interpretations by Svante Arrhenius, but does not thoroughly analyze the published writings of Clausius and Williamson themselves. This paper reappraises Clausius’s and Williamson’s works in their original context and analyzes how their hypotheses came to be associated. This case study emphasizes how the relationship between physics and chemistry evolved in the nineteenth century. More specifically, it underscores the limited communication between these disciplines in the 1850s and the rise of interdisciplinarity in the 1880s, which led to the creation of a new field: physical chemistry. From the study of the emergence and success of the theory of ionic dissociation and physical chemistry, I show that referring to the authoritative figures of Clausius and Williamson legitimized and valorized investigations at the borderlands of physics and chemistry in a context of increased specialization.

Walthère Victor Spring – A Forerunner in the Study of the Greenhouse Effect

In 1886, an article by Walthère Spring and Léon Roland, two scientists from the University of Liège, dealing with the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere in Liège appeared in the “Mẻmoires” of the Royal Academy of Belgium. In order to explain the difference between temperatures in the city of Liège and those observed in that city’s environs, the authors invoked the high level of atmospheric CO2. Although the climatological argument was rather weak and the article concerned only a local impact, it is obvious that Spring can be viewed as a precursor of Svante Arrhenius who foresaw global warming in 1895–1896.