fizyka: History of climate change science

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect was first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth's energy balance and climate. The existence of the greenhouse effect, while not named as such, was proposed as early as 1824 by Joseph Fourier. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838. In 1856 Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated that the warming effect of the sun is greater for air with water vapour than for dry air…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 88

Ice, Fire and Flood: A Short Pre-history of Climate Fiction. This chapter argues that catastrophic climate change fictions have been organised around three main tropes: the new ice age, the burning world and the drowned world. Of these, only the last has a deep history in the Western mythos, dating back to stories of a Great Flood in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. When modern science fiction (SF) began to take shape in the early nineteenth century, it inherited a preoccupation with the Flood from its parent cultures, for example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man , Richard Jefferies’s After London and Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous . This flood motif continued to be important in American p…

Evidence: 39 • authority: 72

Present-day climate change includes both global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its wider effects on Earth's climate system. In a broader sense, climate change also includes previous long-term changes to Earth's climate. The modern-day rise in global temperatures is driven by human activities, especially fossil fuel (coal, oil and natural gas) burning since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel use, deforestation, and some agricultural and industrial practices release greenhouse gases. These gases absorb some of the heat that the Earth radiates after it warms from sunlight, warming the lower atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere now has roughly 50% more carbon dioxi…

Evidence: 28 • authority: 72

The Greenland ice sheet is an ice sheet which forms the second-largest body of ice in the world. It is an average of 1,673 m (5,489 ft) thick and over 3,488 m (11,444 ft) thick at its maximum. It is almost 2,900 kilometres (1,800 mi) long in a north–south direction, with a maximum width of 1,100 kilometres (680 mi) at a latitude of 77°N, near its northern edge. The ice sheet covers 1,710,000 square kilometres (660,000 sq mi), around 80% of the surface of Greenland, or about 12% of the area of the Antarctic ice sheet. The term 'Greenland ice sheet' is often shortened to GIS or GrIS in scientific literature. Greenland has had major glaciers and ice caps for at least 18 million years, but a si…

Evidence: 22 • authority: 80

CLIMATE AND CLIMATE CHANGE | History of Scientific Work on Climate Change

Evidence: 22 • authority: 72

An ice age is a period of time when decreased temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere results in the prolonged presence or expansion of continental alpine glaciers and polar ice caps. The term is applied in several different senses to very long and comparatively short periods of cooling. An ice age may consist of numerous sub-periods where the global temperature and glaciation fluctuates, with the colder periods called glacials, and relatively warmer periods called interglacials. Earth's climate alternates between icehouse and greenhouse periods based on whether there are glaciers on the planet, and for most of Earth's history it has been in a greenhouse period with little or no perma…