Most of us think that Climate change has just been around for not more than 20 years, which is far from reality. Early scientists have also been warning about the bad impact fossil fuels had on the environment. Scientists in the mid 1900s warned about the intense heat absorptive capacity of carbon dioxide, the primary cause of today’s climate crisis.
Centuries Old Discoveries
The first ever paper published to describe the extraordinary impact carbon dioxide posed, was published by an American scientist named Eunice Foote. She conducted a very simple experiment where she put a thermometer in two glass cylinders. She filled one cylinder with CO2 and the other one with air. As a result of it, the one which had CO2 in it, got much hotter than the one with air inside it.
First Statistical Estimate
The first ever quantitative study of the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was done by a Swedish scientist and Nobel laureate named Svante Arrhenius. In 1896, he calculated that the Arctic regions could warm by 8-9 degrees Celsius, if the carbon dioxide increased by 2.5 or 3 times.
