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The Callendar Effect: The Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar (1898-1964), The Scientist Who Established the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change (Historical Monographs)

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"The Callendar Effect" is a fascinating work. Written by friend and colleague James Rodger Fleming, a professor at Colby College and a leading historian of atmospheric sciences and weather prediction, it tells the story of Guy Stewart Callendar. Callendar was the most unassuming of scientific heroes. A noted British steam engineer, in 1938 he published the critical study, "The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature," which laid out his earliest thoughts on the role of carbon dioxide in climate change.

Using his own weather measurements, as well as compilations from others, Callendar assembled considerable evidence to show an upward trend in temperatures for the first four decades of the twentieth century. When he compared that data with changes in glaciers, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide coming with the Industrial Revolution, and other readings, he reached the now scientific conventional wisdom that the use of fossil fuels caused a rise of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and that in turn was linked to increased radiation and a resultant rise in global temperatures. While an amateur, his work was pathbreaking, so much so that he has been credited with "The Callendar Effect" on how global warming results from CO2.

While most have never heard of Guy Callendar his importance in the history of climate research is secure. It is also represented variously depended on perspectives. Most scientists and historians of science, and certainly the author of this work is in this category, revere Callendar's work and his efforts to understand the workings of the physical environment. This book is a testament to his work and an attempt to rescue him from obscurity within the larger society. At the same time, skeptics of global warming point to Guy Callendar as one of the chief perpetrators of the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," as Oklahoma arch-conservative senator John Inhofe called global warming in a July 2003 congressional speech. Several sites on the Internet condemn Callendar as an amateur who advocated the existence of the greenhouse effect but whose studies "have been discredited." Nevermind that his studies have been verified repeatedly.