Taking the Earth's Temperature: 200 years of research has established why the Earth is as warm as it is and how burning fossil fuels is making it warmer

Abstract

Because of the threat of global warming due to the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, energy use is the central factor in creating a sustainable future. Anthropogenic climate change is real, but climate change deniers insist that carbon pollution is not a threat and that the science behind climate change is flimsy at best and a sham at worst. In fact, efforts to understand Earth’s climate and why the planet’s temperature is what it is date back to the early 19^th century, and I review that history in this paper. Earth’s atmosphere was first likened to a greenhouse in the 1820s; CO₂ was first shown to be a greenhouse gas in the 1860s; the idea that burning fossil fuels could change the Earth’s temperature was proposed in 1896; the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere was first shown to be inexorably rising in the 1950s. The science of climate change has a long and distinguished pedigree.