ABSTRACT
Global warming is a term that entered the domain of both popular and scientific literature during the 1980s. It is closely linked with the idea of an increasing greenhouse effect, which was first calculated by a Swedish chemist, Svente August Arrhenius, in 1896 (Arrhenius 1997). It is believed that our atmosphere acts rather like a greenhouse, in which the glass allows solar radiation to pass through, where it is converted into heat. This heat is absorbed by the soil before being radiated out as long-wave radiation and intercepted this time by the glass, which re-radiates some of the energy back into the greenhouse. The atmosphere has properties rather similar to the glass of the greenhouse, hence the ‘greenhouse effect’, originally postulated by the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Fourier (1824
