James Croll of Scotland (who was a janitor at a college) taught himself astronomy and was the first to show that Earth's Ice Ages were the result of the changing orbit of the earth around the sun, the tilt of the earth, and the precession of the earth combined with the albedo (reflection) of earth's surface. His work was published and he did get a professional job. Arrhenius was asked to come up with another way to explain earth's changing climate by the Swedish chemical society to refute Croll's ideas. Arrhenius came up with the "greenhouse" effect." Croll's ideas were stolen by a Serbian called Milankovitch and the cycles are named after him instead.