The Earth’s climate has been changing since the beginning of time,
and today the scientific community overwhelmingly agrees:
The recent warming is because of human activity.
So why is climate change so controversial?
I’m meteorologist Jason Meyers and since people
began studying our climate, it’s been a divided topic.
In the late 18th century,
geologists found evidence of a number of geological ages
with noticeable changes in climate.
The biggest clue?
Signs of glacial activity in places
where it was way too warm for any glaciers.
But no one really knew why the climate had been
so much colder before.
In the first half of the 1800s,
a number of scientists and mathematicians discovered
our atmosphere was retaining the sun’s heat close to
the Earth’s surface.
Without it, the planet would be a lot colder.
In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote discovered it was
the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere
causing this greenhouse effect.
Sounds familiar?
It was then in 1896 that Svante Arrhenius used
some really complex math to accurately calculate
the amount of warming or cooling an increase
or decrease of carbon dioxide would have.
At that time, he figured it’d take thousands of years
before any warming would occur.
Little did he know how much more carbon dioxide
would get pumped into the atmosphere in the next century.
During the next 50 years, our understanding of the atmosphere
as well as sunspots, solar radiation based
on variations in Earth’s orbit,
volcanic activity and ocean currents were all possible answers
as to why the Earth’s climate was constantly changing.
By the 1960s, climate change research transformed
from understanding the climate cycle to
realizing humankind’s contribution,
but it wouldn’t get much press for another 20 years.
In the 1980s, scientists use ice cores as a way to
study the history of atmosphere.
For the first time they were able to link the amount of
carbon dioxide to the Earth’s temperature,
confirming a real-life relationship of the two
that hadn’t been seen outside of climate models before.
In June 1988 in the midst of a heat wave and severe drought,
James Hansen was the first person to testify
in front of Congress about the dangers of
human-caused climate change.
Since then, climate change research has expanded and grown.
Despite a better understanding and 98 percent of
climate scientists in agreement,
there are still people who either deny any warming at all
or don’t believe humans have anything to do with it,
which leaves me wondering:
Why is it so hard for some of us to accept
we’re inadvertently changing the planet where we live?