Of greater significance is that he was the first scientist to calculate how changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could alter the surface temperature of the Earth through the greenhouse effect, predicting that the burning of fossil fuels was large enough to cause significant global warming. Most remarkably he did all of this before 1900, which is pretty depressing because it shows that we already were beginning to understand scientifically some of the deleterious consequences of burning fossil fuels well over a hundred years ago and we did almost nothing about it.
