Climate Scientist Digs Up Data By Literally Mining The News
Paper Chase By sampling data from newspaper clippings as if they were ice cores, scientists are learning more about how our atmosphere has changed alongside our technology. Vasily Fedos Enko/Reuters; iStock In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius theorized that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by burning coal would create a "greenhouse effect" and raise the planet's average temperature. Most scientists scoffed. How could the puny actions of humans ever seriously alter the natural climate cycles? It wasn't until 1958 that measurements began to show levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rising and temperatures shifting. Understanding precisely how human activities have influenced such changes will help us understand what to do in the future. So climate researchers keep looking for new ways to dig into the past. "We are trying to see how bad we are," is the way Dan Yakir puts it. Yakir is a biogeochemist at the Weizmann...