Deal! I’ll warn everyone about the climate crisis and we will have changed the world being warned early and the world will be saved by learning in the 80’s of the danger ahead!
I know this was a joke, but I was kinda wondering when we first started talking about Climate Change as an issue.
It looks like some guy in Sweden named ‘Svante Arrhenius’ was the first to really get everything properly worked out and documented back in 1896, but the first time it really started to go mainstream seems like it was with ‘economist William Nordhaus’ back in 1975 just feeling like it might be starting to become a real problem.
Yeah, it’s kind of hard to come up with a cutoff. There’s lots of really old vague theories that had the right idea. Eventually you get to the point where you’re thinking that there was probably a caveman somewhere who built a fire in a cave and wondered what would happen if the whole world filled with smoke.
From a science perspective, Svante seems to have mostly had it, but applying the science really started to coalesce in the 1950s. The American Petroleum Institute actually funded a study in 1959 to figure out if they were really going to destroy the planet. Their findings were a bit more extreme than what actually worked out, they thought New York would be underwater around 1990, but it pretty well established things.
Anyone has a Delorean on hand? I’d need to go back to 1955 and steal a book
Best I can do is a restored DeLorean that maxes out at 87
Deal! I’ll warn everyone about the climate crisis and we will have changed the world being warned early and the world will be saved by learning in the 80’s of the danger ahead!
Fast forward 2025…
I know this was a joke, but I was kinda wondering when we first started talking about Climate Change as an issue.
It looks like some guy in Sweden named ‘Svante Arrhenius’ was the first to really get everything properly worked out and documented back in 1896, but the first time it really started to go mainstream seems like it was with ‘economist William Nordhaus’ back in 1975 just feeling like it might be starting to become a real problem.
Depends on what you mean by ‘we’.
Exxon knew about it in the 70s and is said to have predicted the results with “shocking” accuracy.
Yeah, it’s kind of hard to come up with a cutoff. There’s lots of really old vague theories that had the right idea. Eventually you get to the point where you’re thinking that there was probably a caveman somewhere who built a fire in a cave and wondered what would happen if the whole world filled with smoke.
From a science perspective, Svante seems to have mostly had it, but applying the science really started to coalesce in the 1950s. The American Petroleum Institute actually funded a study in 1959 to figure out if they were really going to destroy the planet. Their findings were a bit more extreme than what actually worked out, they thought New York would be underwater around 1990, but it pretty well established things.