History of Climate Change

Tackling global climate change and tracking greenhouse gas emissions has become a collective effort. The World Bank recently launched an initiative in collaboration with NASA and the European Space Agency to collect and organize satellite-based measurements of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.^One

Back on the surface of the Earth, companies around the world are also tracking greenhouse gas emissions from their businesses and value chains. Some use software tools to measure progress in achieving carbon emissions reductions to meet ESG goals and comply with environmental regulations.

The urgency surrounding climate change mitigation has never been greater, but the understanding and awareness that created that urgency has taken nearly 200 years to develop. Let’s take a look at how climate change has evolved from a little-known concept to a widely accepted phenomenon that is sparking action around the world.

1800s: Early climate science

Theories about climate change date back to the early 19th century. The earliest observations of the phenomenon that eventually became known as the greenhouse effect came from French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier. In 1824, Fourier wrote that gases in Earth’s atmosphere trap heat, making the Earth warmer than usual.

In 1856, through experiments with various gas combinations, American amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote identified water vapor and carbon dioxide (then called carbonic acid) as the main heat-trapping culprits. E) The temperature is high.”²

Ironically, it was curiosity about ice ages rather than global warming that furthered our understanding of modern climate change. Irish physicist John Tyndall set out to determine whether changes in the composition of Earth’s atmosphere contributed to prehistoric ice ages. Like Foote, Tyndall experimented with a variety of gases. In the 1860s, he demonstrated that the gases produced by heating coal, consisting of carbon dioxide, methane, and volatile hydrocarbons, absorbed large amounts of energy.^three

Building on Tyndall’s discoveries, in 1896 Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius developed a climate model that showed how varying atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations could affect global temperatures. Like Tyndall, Arrhenius also began theorizing what conditions, including emissions from volcanic eruptions, could have led to Earth’s ice age. Arrhenius also took into account contemporary sources of emissions, such as the burning of fossil fuels during the Second Industrial Revolution, and the rise in average temperatures this could cause.

Arrhenius predicted that it would take 3,000 years for atmospheric CO2 levels to double, rising by 5 to 6 degrees Celsius. But contrary to today’s attitudes, Arrhenius was not alarmed by such potential changes to the Earth’s climate. Rather, he predicted that as average temperatures rise, people will “live in warmer skies and less harsh environments than we have allowed.”⁴

1900s: Attitudes toward climate change changed.

In the 1930s, British steam engineer and amateur scientist Guy Callendar collected and analyzed historical temperature information and carbon dioxide measurements from around the world and found that surface temperatures rose by 0.3 degrees Celsius and atmospheric carbon dioxide decreased by 6% in the 1930s. We found that there was an increase. 1880 and 1935. To link the two trends, Callendar improved Arrhenius’ equations and performed his own calculations. Ultimately, he concluded that changes in carbon dioxide levels from burning fossil fuels accounted for half of the rise in global temperatures between 1880 and 1935.

But like Arrhenius, Callendar’s outlook on climate change was rosy. He predicted that crop production would increase in the Northern Hemisphere and future ice ages would be prevented.(4) But by the 1950s, some scientists had adopted a distinctly different tone. In a 1953 presentation to the American Geophysical Union, physicist Gilbert Plass made headlines when he warned that Earth’s surface temperature was rising at a rate of 1.5 degrees every 100 years due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.⁵

Later that decade, American oceanographer and climate scientist Roger Revelle showed that the ocean, which is thought to be responsible for regulating the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, was absorbing the gases much more slowly than previously thought. Revelle’s colleague Charles David Keeling built a carbon dioxide monitoring station in Hawaii. His measurements of the Mauna Loa volcano led to the Keeling Curve, a long-term data series showing increasing carbon dioxide levels that was later praised for setting “the stage for today’s serious concerns about climate change.”⁶

Late 20th Century and Beyond: Discovery Driven by Technology

The 1950s and ’60s ushered in an era in which computer models became pivotal tools for climate scientists. One of the most influential models was created by Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. In a 1967 paper documenting the model results, Manabe and Wetherald concluded: CO2 in the atmosphere has doubled from existing levels, and this increase will cause global temperatures to rise by 2.3 degrees Celsius.⁷ Their predictions, made in the early days of digital computing, have proven to be surprisingly close to the results later conveyed by more advanced models.

The launch of NASA’s Nimbus III satellite in 1969 took the technology used to study climate change a step further. The weather satellite’s instruments have provided unprecedented temperature measurements of various parts of the atmosphere, giving scientists a more holistic picture of temperature changes on Earth. Today, satellites continue to be an important tool for collecting climate change data. Recently, NASA began collaborating with IBM to use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to extract insights from satellite data.

While scientists continue to analyze data collected from space, others are taking advantage of the information available underground. Since the 1960s, paleoclimatologists have studied the composition of ice cores, cylinders of ice drilled from ice sheets and glaciers in places like Antarctica and Greenland. Deep ice cores contain particles such as aerosols and bubbles captured thousands of years ago, providing historical information about Earth’s climate system. Evidence from studies of Antarctic ice cores suggests that over an 800,000-year period, carbon dioxide ranged from 180 to 300 ppm, significantly lower than CO2 concentrations measured today, lending further credence to concerns that the Earth is experiencing unprecedented conditions.⁸

climate science Influencing global public policy

Mounting evidence of the importance and severity of climate change has prompted a global effort to address policy decisions since the late 1980s.

1987: The Montreal Protocol obliges countries around the world to phase out the use of substances found to be depleting the ozone layer of the Earth’s atmosphere.

1988: The United Nations establishes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to advance scientific knowledge on climate change caused by human activities.

1997: The Kyoto Protocol becomes the first international treaty to set legally binding targets for developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

2015: The Paris Agreement brings developing countries on board and sets emissions targets for about 200 signatories. The new agreement aimed to prevent global average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That same year, the United Nations adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include an emphasis on adopting sustainable energy systems, sustainable forest management, and reducing emissions.

Climate change today: urgent action through policy and innovation

In its sixth assessment report, published in 2023, the IPCC predicted that significant and timely mitigation and adaptation efforts will reduce the negative impacts of climate change on people and ecosystems. The Panel noted that policies and laws on climate change mitigation have expanded since the fifth assessment report published in 2014.

However, ongoing mitigation efforts have not prevented visible signs of climate change, including changing climate patterns and extreme weather events. An increase in droughts, heat waves, wildfires and torrential rains in recent years has been attributed to climate change, as has rising and falling Arctic sea ice. Copernicus, the European climate monitoring agency, declared 2023 the warmest year on record.

This alarming trend is driving government and business leaders from Washington, D.C. to Sydney, Australia, to redouble their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change. These efforts include improving energy efficiency, transitioning to renewable energy sources, and leveraging ESG data monitoring and analytics tools to make decisions.

“The end game has to be a net zero or carbon neutral outcome,” said Steve Ford, head of sustainability at Australia-based GPT Group, a diversified real estate group that is reducing its carbon footprint with the help of monitoring and analytics technology. “Anyone who doesn’t see this as the end game for energy and climate-related environmental impacts is playing on the wrong planet.”

As more companies focus on reducing emissions, data management is in the spotlight to ensure sustainability efforts are on track. ESG reporting software from IBM Envizi™ integrates a suite of modules to help you capture and manage all ESG data in a single system of record and report with confidence that the data is auditable and financial grade.

Explore IBM Envizi ESG Suite

^One“How is satellite data transforming the way we track global greenhouse gas emissions?” (Link is external to ibm.com). Data Blog, World Bank. January 25, 2024.

²“How 19^Day “For centuries scientists have predicted global warming.” (Link is external to ibm.com). JSTOR Daily. December 17, 2019.

^three“The History of Climate Change.” (Link is external to ibm.com). History.com. June 9, 2023.

⁴“C.O.₂, Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming: From the Pioneering Work of Arrhenius and Callendar to Today’s Earth System Models.” (Link is external to ibm.com). Effort, Vol. 40, No. 3, September 2016.

⁵“Scientist who raised the dangers of carbon dioxide in the 1950s.” (Link is external to ibm.com). tutelar. June 22, 2023.

⁶“Obituary: Pioneer of Climate Science: Charles David Keeling.” (Link is external to ibm.com). Scripps Institution of Oceanography, June 21, 2005.

⁷“Thermal equilibrium of the atmosphere given the relative humidity distribution.” (Link is external to ibm.com). Journal of Atmospheric Science, Vol. 24, no. 3. May 1967.

⁸“What do ice cores reveal about the past?” (Link is external to ibm.com). CIRES National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado Boulder. March 24, 2023.