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Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he’d “wasted over a full year” doing tedious calculations by hand about “so trifling a matter” as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).
Which surely means there’s a metric of stupidity that gets exponentially bigger the further from of the discovery of Greenhouse Effect.
Well, it is said pollution inhibits brain capacity
For additional context, two world wars were fought between the “discovery” of the green house effect in the global context. It really feels like marking the time the climate movement started as somewhere in the 1950’s (History.com mentions the first major study on the matter was in 1958 ) is a more realistic timeframe to say “we really should have known better” (since that’s when word would have begun trickling to the masses).
That’s not to say that we’re smart - it’s not to say that we’re not stupid, its just to say we’re not quite as stupid as the comic would have you think
It goes even further back: Joseph Fourier wrote about the mechanism for global warming in the 1820s although he didn’t make the connection with CO2. We’ve effectively had 200 years to deal with this shit.
