# Svante Arrhenius Svante Arrhenius was a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel laureate (1903, for his work on electrolytic dissociation) who, in 1896, produced the first quantitative estimate of how changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide would alter global temperature. Building on the [[Greenhouse Effect]] physics demonstrated by [[John Tyndall]], he calculated that doubling CO2 would warm the planet by roughly 5°C — a figure remarkably close to the modern best estimate of [[Climate Sensitivity]]. Arrhenius viewed warming as a distant and even benign prospect for his cold northern homeland; he could not have anticipated the speed at which fossil-fuel combustion would force the change. His calculation is the historical origin of climate sensitivity as a scientific question. *Stub — expand with the 1896 paper, his exchange with Arvid Högbom on coal emissions, and his later revisions.*