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gwern comments on Svante Arrhenius's Prediction of Climate Change - Less Wrong
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Comments (22)
This seems like an oversimplification. It would seem more accurate that Arrhenius thought on balance it would have a net positive humanitarian impact and current consensus is that it is net negative.
Do we know whether Arrhenius was right at the time that it was a net positive? 1896 was quite a long time ago, as far as populations and economies go.
No idea. I have no idea if anyone has looked into this in that much detail. My guess would be that he was wrong, since agriculture would have been even more insensitive to change in many parts of the world (although less so in other areas since monocropping wasn't as common).
He was writing soon after the end (in retrospect) of the Little Ice Age, which I think is generally agreed (then and now) to have had negative effects. So a predicted return to warmer temperatures would be a good thing - it's not called the Medieval Climate Optimum for nothing!
The difference between the Optimum and the LIA was less than 1C, so saying warming up another 1C would be even better was extrapolation. But Arrhenius probably didn't have historical climate data of that precision, and it may have been the reasonable prediction to make.
The LIA and the Optimum weren't global - some places cooled down, others heated up. (As is true of most climate change). But again, Arrhenius wouldn't have known that. The last 800 years of history up to his time, on either side of the North Atlantic, were of gradual cooling down with deleterious effects.
Yes, the Little Ice Age was part of what I was thinking of, although I was unsure it was really relevant - the Little Ice Age should've ended at least 50 years before Arrhenius seems to have done his relevant work.