History of Global Warming Global warming wasn’t just a term that came out of nowhere, there was a series of events that led up to the founding of the idea. The man who was the first to state that the combustion of fossil fuels would perhaps magnify the process of global warming was named Svante Arrhenius. He found out that there was indeed a relation between the abundance of carbon dioxide, water vapor and the absorption of heat in the atmosphere. He implied that this was simply due to the fact that gases have the capacity to absorb heat from the sun, and this is when the greenhouse effect was discovered. Arrhenius worked with a man named Thomas Chamberlin, in which they both came to the conclusion that human emissions of these gases would in turn could contribute to the warming of the earth.
Even though propositions such as these were made during the 1900s, many believed that the human impact on global warming was miniscule compared to nature’s impact. In addition, some people actually thought that the environment, i.e. the oceans, actually acted as carbon sinks that absorb whatever amount of human CO2 was released, virtually reducing our influence to 0. And so at the time, it wasn’t carbon dioxide that was such a concern, but moreso water vapor that was believed to be the pivotal greenhouse gas. However, with just a few decades of time, there was research that suggested that carbon dioxide had an atmospheric lifetime of nearly 10 years. To make matters more controversial, it was also found that oceans wouldn’t exactly be able to take in all of the CO2 in the atmosphere, in actuality they would only be able to contain about ⅓ of the amount.
By 1960, technology was finally taking a stand in developing statistics and visual evidence of the theory. A man by the name of Charles Keeling was one of the scientists during the time that utilized a technique that mapped out curves for atmospheric carbon dioxide. In fact, these curve models are still used in modern days on a different level to track the trends of global warming and its causes. Unlike today though, curves in the 60’s were showing signs that the atmosphere was actually lowering in temperature, and this surprised many to the point where they were worried that another ice age may be approaching. It was because of this that for the next 20 years, the term global warming was replaced with global cooling. By 1980 though, global cooling was short lived as the curves began to reveal trends of the warming atmosphere. There was a lot of talk about the now recognized issue and media began to spread information about the negative effects that global warming may have in the future.
In 1989, climate change was a growing matter that called for world power intervention. The foundation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) occurred in response to everything and has since been making efforts to report temperature data by the year. Now being a global affair, it is interesting to understand how global warming has been addressed in the past and how it has been dealt with as a topic that is still growing today. Initially, I had thought that global warming had been known for centuries, having said that, I have been clearly proven wrong. If actions were taken earlier in the past to prevent this conflict, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal today.
"Water Treatment Solutions." History of the greenhouse effect and global warming. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Jan. 2017.