• Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    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.