Concern about climate change goes a long way back. That’s important to understand, because there are fossil industry-oriented public relations efforts to convince people that concern about climate change is new, unscientific and politically motivated. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The first scientific report on climate change and carbon dioxide was published in 1856, and the first article on fossil fuels and climate change was published in 1912. From those times to around the 1990s, there was discussion but no serious dispute concerning the basic underlying science. Only after a public relations campaign by the fossil fuel industry manufactured doubt did we experience political polarization over the issue.
The history, in brief outline:
In 1856, Eunice Foote was the first scientist to discover the heating effect of carbon dioxide on incoming solar energy. This was three years before John Tyndall, a British scientist who has widely been credited with first establishing the connection between increased global temperatures and carbon dioxide.
In 1908, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius argues that the greenhouse effect from coal and petroleum use is warming the globe. According to his calculations, doubling C02 would lead to average temperature increase of 5 to 6 degrees C. Rather than being alarmed, Arrhenius is pleased that people in the future would “live under a warmer sky and a less harsh environment than we were granted.” In his book Worlds in the Making, he says that with increased CO2 “we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the Earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.” (Also see Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming).
In March, 1912, Popular Mechanics published “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of Combustion of Coal on the Climate: What Scientists Predict,” by Francis Molena. “Since burning coal produces carbon dioxide, it may be inquired whether the enormous use of that fuel in modern times may not be an important factor in filling the atmosphere with this substance and consequently in indirectly raising the temperature of the earth.”
Many other papers on climate, weather and related topics were published in scientific papers during the intervening years, but a major event was a paper by Gilbert N. Plass on a warmer climate presented in a May, 1953 American Geophysical Union meeting.
In 1953, the Washington Post reported:
World Industry, pouring its exhausts into the air, may be making the earth’s climate warmer,a Johns Hopkins physicist, reported here yesterday. Releases of carbon dioxide from burning coals and oils, said Dr. Gilbert N. Plass, blanket the earth’s surface ‘like glass in a greenhouse.’ So much carbon dioxide has been released in this industrial century that the earth’s average temperature is rising 1 1/2 degrees (F) a century, he said. Similar but more naturally caused changes in the air’s carbon dioxide content may account for the ice ages and warm intervals in geologic time, he added… Latest experimental and theoretical calculations, he reported, show that doubling the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere causes surface temperatures to rise four degrees (F) if no other changes occur. But, he added, still other earth warming factors may also be triggered by increased carbon dioxide in the air. It could cause less rainfall by its effect on the clouds and less cloud cover for the earth,’ both tending to make the climate warmer and drier,’ he said. Dr Plass said the newer calculations bolster the theory first proposed in 1861 that decreases in the carbon dioxide content of the earth’s atmosphere caused the ice ages in geologic history. The theory, he said, has not generally been accepted because the effects ‘appeared to be too small.’ It appears now, he said, that even the physicists supporting the theory underestimated the climate-changing effects of the carbon dioxide content in the earth’s atmosphere. (“Industrial Gasses Warming Up Earth, Physicist Notes Here,” Washington Post, May 5, p. 5, probably by Nate Haseltine).
In 1958, film director Frank Capra produced a film about climate change called UNCHAINED GODDESS
“Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his civilization … Carbon dioxide, helps air absorb heat from the sun … It’s been calculated that a few degrees rise in the earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps… and if this happens, an inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley.” (Click on the graphic to see the YouTube video). Obviously, the cartoon is not really an accurate representation of anticipated global sea level rise, but it’s clear that climate change and global warming were well understood in the 1950s.
In the 1960s and 70s, scientific information about the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere and the possible damage it could cause lead to major international research efforts.
In 1975, one possibility is examined in a Newsweek article about “global cooling” by Peter Gwynne, who points out that this was only one point of view at the time. Others want to “retire” the global cooling article.
More historical information:
Spencer Weart’s history of global warming (updated)
Real Climate’s notes on Glibert Plass. Also see Real Climate, technical site for climate scientists.
How should the media cover climate change?
- Doom and Gloom: The Role of the Media in Public Disengagement on Climate Change, May, 2018, Elizabeth Arnold
- SEJ Climate Backgrounder — Society of Environmental Journalists guide to climate change information and disinformation.
- Climate 101 — Former New York Times reporter Andrew C. Revkin’s 2015 climate briefing paper drawing from major reports. Excellent overview.
- MSNBC Climate Change report from 2013, on Google Hangout.
Public opinion and climate