Early publication (in German) on anthropogenic global warming by Swedish scientist and Nobel laureate (1903) Svante Aarhenius, “On the heat absorption by carbon dioxide and its influence on the temperature of the Earth’s surface.” This work follows an 1896 paper (“Ueber den Einfluss des Atmosphärischen Kohlensäurengehalts auf die Temperatur der Erdoberfläche”) in which Arrhenius, building on the work of Samuel Pierpont Langley and several others, first calculated the increase in Earth surface temperature caused by increases in industrial carbon production. Formulated in an attempt to explain the ice ages, Arrhenius’ calculations omitted certain factors necessary for accuracy — and, based on the rate of carbon production in his time, he expected warming to take hundreds of years — but his work remains the first attempt to measure the greenhouse effect. Originally published in Annalen der Physik earlier that same year, this edition is often mistakenly referred to as an offprint. In fact it is the first separate appearance, published by the Översigt af Kongliga Vetenskaps-Akademiens Förhandlingar (Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences). Rare. OCLC only seems to locate the journal appearance.

$1,500