The following year, 1908, Henry Ford introduced his multimillion-selling Model T, and Svante Arrhenius published the English-language edition of his magnum opus, Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe. This audacious work, conceived (like the Model T) with a general audience in mind, was the first popular science book to examine the possibility of anthropogenic warming. After describing the “hot-house” theory of Earth’s climate, demonstrated by Saussure in the 1770s and expanded on by Fourier, Foote, Tyndall, and others, Arrhenius went a step further: “The enormous combustion of
...more
