Throughout the 1990s, Albert Arnold “Al” Gore supported environmental initiatives such as the Global Marshall Plan which would require countries to change their industrial production to protect the environment, and eventually produced a very popular film called “An Inconvenient Truth” that silenced those who claim climate change to be unreal. This, however, was nowhere close to when the whole idea of climate started. In fact, though we may not know when the idea of climate change exactly started, we do know that the idea of climate change has existed since the ancient Greeks. During that time, many people had proposed that humans could change temperatures and influence rainfall through human activities such as woodcutting, farming, and irrigation. Ancient Greek plant biologist Theophratus observed and noted that Crete’s mountain winters were becoming more severe over time and that the Greek city of Larrisus once had an abundance of olive trees, but that they are now gone due to decreased temperatures. In the 1820s, French mathematician Joseph Fourier proposed that the Earth must be getting warmer through a greenhouse effect. In the 1860s, Irish scientist John Tyndall demonstrated that carbon dioxide absorbs sunlight like a sponge. By 1895, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated that increased carbon dioxide levels would increases global temperatures. By the 1930s, British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar argued that global warming was already taking place, in large part due to the industrial revolution. In 1958, American geochemist Charles Keeling developed the Keeling Curve, which showed that carbon dioxide levels in the earth is steadily increasing. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen told Congress that he was “99 percent sure” that there is global warming. And in 1989, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to seriously study climate change.

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Last modified: 21 October 2018