When did we discover climate change?

When did we discover climate change?

If you’re over fifty like me, your answer might be the 1990s, or possibly the 80s. I suspect that’s the answer most people will give. And if you’re younger, that’s what you were probably taught at school.

But that answer is mistaken.

We erroneously assume the climate change debate started around then, and there is a good reason for this. This was, arguably, when it first appeared widely in the public domain.

It’s when it first made the news headlines and began to appear on our tv screens. Many of us who were around in the 1990s can remember the international conferences being reported in news bulletins and newspapers of the time.

·??????The United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development resulting in the Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

·??????The 1st Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) to outline specific targets on emissions, held in Berlin in 1995.

·??????The Kyoto Protocol, in which the broad outlines of emissions targets were agreed, held in Kyoto, Japan in 1997.

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So, when was climate change really discovered?

The truth is probably very different to what you think. You can easily add another 100 years to the timeline.

In 1912, the same year as the sinking of the Titanic, and when Scott and Amundsen reached the South Pole, an article appeared in the journal Popular Mechanics with the title, Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate — What Scientists Predict for the Future.

The author of the article, Francis Molena, noted that,

“it has been found that if the air contained more carbon dioxide, […..] the temperature would be somewhat higher. Since burning coal produces carbon dioxide it may be inquired whether the enormous use of the fuel in modern times may not be an important factor in filling the atmosphere with this substance, and consequently indirectly raising the temperature of the earth.” [i]

Molena concluded that the annual burning of 7 billion tons of coal would cause considerable effects in a few centuries. Of course, he couldn’t have predicted the great acceleration in population growth and demand for resources and energy that would occur during the rest of the twentieth century. This led in turn to an accelerated release in the amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and consequently, bringing the date forward.

The story was even picked up by a couple of newspapers in the same year, The?Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette in New Zealand, and?The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal in Australia. However, there appears to be no evidence that the story travelled any further.

And Molena wasn’t the first person to raise the question of climate change. Swedish scientist Svante August Arrhenius confirmed the principle at the end of the nineteenth century, and he in turn was building on the work of earlier scientists like Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall, and Claude Pouillet to name a few.

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The climate change debate during the twentieth century

Nor was Molena the last to raise the issue of climate change before the current debate started.

In 1938, steam engineer and inventor Guy Callendar was able to prove the link between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change, publishing a paper where he noted “it is now possible to make a reasonable estimate of the effect of carbon dioxide on temperatures.” [ii] It must be pointed out that he believed the change would be beneficial for cultivation in the northern hemisphere.

After the Second World War, the discussion continued in scientific circles. Sverre Petterssen, of the University of Chicago believed in 1957 that “if the warm trend continues there will be some remarkable changes.” He believed the changes “would be quite severe.” [iii]

In another article written by Clifford B. Hicks in 1964, it was noted that “man’s tampering with nature has thrown earth’s CO2 cycle out of balance. A prime offender, researchers agree, is the automobile.” [iv] Both articles also appeared in Popular Mechanics.

And the story didn’t end there. Coal and oil companies doing their own research also reached the same conclusions during the 1960s and 70s.

Probably the most notorious example is Exxon Mobile whose scientists researched the subject from 1978 through to 1983. The company chose to keep the research secret and instead launch a million-dollar campaign to deny climate change was real and to discredit scientists who challenged them.[v]

And by all accounts they were not the only ones.

Fortunately for us, in 2014, in a possible oversight from Exxon, it handed over all this and other research on climate change to Columbia University. The university made it public a year later.

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The complete climate change story

But the real credit for discovering the relationship between carbon dioxide and climate change, should probably be given to a woman, Eunice Newton Foote. Her research was presented to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1856. [vi]

So, the discovery of climate change by scientists is not a recent phenomenon. Its science can be traced back to the nineteenth century and was investigated and discussed continuously throughout the twentieth century.

The only thing that has changed over the past thirty years is the amount of information available to us on climate change, and it is now public knowledge widely reported by journalists.

And of course, the urgency.

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[i] (Molena 1912)

[ii] (Callendar 1938)

[iii] (popularmechanics.com 2018)

[iv] (Hicks 1964)

[v] (Milman 2023)

[vi] (Shapiro 2021)

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Referenced Sources

Callendar, Guy S. 1938. "The Artifical Production of Carbon Dioxide and its Influence on Temperature." The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 64 (275): 223-249.??

Hicks, Clifford B. 1964. "The Air Around Us is Changing." Popular Mechanics (Google Books) (Aug. 1964): 81-85, 178.

Milman, Oliver. 2023. "Revealed: Exxon made 'breathtakingly' accurate climate predictions in 1970s and 80s." The Guardian (Thursday 12 January).

Molena, Francis. 1912. "Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effects of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate - What Scientist Predict for the Future." Popular Mechanics (Google Books) 339-342.

popularmechanics.com. 2018. "We've Been Talking About Climate Change for a Hundred Years." Popular Mechanics (Popular Mechanics).

Shapiro, Maure. 2021. "Eunice Newton Foote's nearly forgotten discovery." Physics Today (23 Aug. 2021).

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In Profile: Anita Sonia

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Anita Sonia is a Kenyan environmental and climate activist from the Maasai community. She is the author of the book Green War and TEDx talker.

In her short career, Sonia has been involved in various campaigns including tree planting. Recently during the drought in the Horn of Africa, she has been raising the issue of the plight of people facing water scarcity.

She is founder of the Spice Foundation that seeks to engage young people in environmentalism and climate change, and the Sonia Foundation which raises awareness of social issues. She also has a communication role in the organization, We Don’t Have Time.

During the Kenyan general election in 2022, Sonia ran as the youngest ever candidate on an environmental platform.

If you want to learn more about environmental activism from an African perspective, Sonia is one to follow.

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What to read

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Last December, almost 200 countries agreed to halt biodiversity decline. And yet, some experts are warning that task may be harder than we think.

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Biodiversity targets may be slipping out of reach - study - BBC News

Have you heard of the Banana index? Nor me, and it has nothing to do with the Minions.

It's a different way to measure the impact of our food.

A different way to measure the climate impact of food | The Economist

One wonders indeed. The oil companies knew for decades about climate change and carbon emission, but they did everything they could to obstruct action to tackle it.

An additional resource to the list above.

Big Oil V the World review – how can these climate crisis deniers sleep at night? | Television & radio | The Guardian

What to watch

50 years after the publication of the seminal report to the Club of Rome “The Limits to Growth” (1972) it is possible to reassess the role of models as tools to examine the future and, within some limits, predict it. It has been said that “all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

It is true, but what does it mean in practice, especially facing an incredible proliferation of models in all fields of science?

To understand this subject, Ugo Bardi discusses some of the best known, and most common, models, starting from “world modeling” (the subject of the “Limits to Growth” study, to move to climate models, ecosystem models, and other kind of model. The complexity of the subject is nothing less than bewildering, but it is possible to discern some trends, and produce some recommendations.

Often, simpler models turn out to have a better record as predicting tools than complex ones. The case of “The Limits to Growth” is an illustration of this point: although it was a very simple model compared to the current standards, its basic scenario turned out to be able to describe the trajectory of the world system up to now.

?Ugo Bardi - The Limits to Growth 50 years later. The role of models in studying the future” - YouTube

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