bringing meteorologists together with the geophysicists and other folks to think through the implications of this in very abstract, theoretical terms,” Mahony said.īut it wasn't long before this theoretical puzzle became a serious concern.īy the late eighties, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up to assess how much the climate is warming and if humans have anything to do with it.Įver since its first report in 1990, the link between fossil fuels and global warming was clear. “In the 1960s, you start getting conferences and workshops on ‘the CO2 problem’. Meteorologists in the middle of the twentieth century also started to understand the climate as a “system that is dynamic, constantly changing, and perhaps also vulnerable to external forcing and alteration,” said Martin Mahony, a lecturer of human geography at the University of East Anglia who studies the history of climate science and its interactions with politics.Īdd to that the knowledge that CO2 levels were going up and scientists started realizing that this could be a major issue. And for the last sixty years, researchers could definitively measure that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were rising, thanks to a CO2-monitoring station at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Scientists in the early 1800s began to recognize that some gasses and water vapor could trap heat in the atmosphere. There may be an uptick in climate-related policy, discussions and activism, but the science isn't all that new. EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series answering some of the most fundamental questions around climate change, the science behind it, the effects of a warming planet and how the world is addressing it.
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