Renaissance European and later scholars saw that deforestation, irrigation, and grazing had altered the lands around the Mediterranean since ancient times they thought it plausible that these human interventions had affected the local weather. ![]() ![]() In the 1st century BC, Roman writer and architect Vitruvius wrote about climate in relation to housing architecture and how to choose locations for cities. ![]() For example, Theophrastus, a pupil of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC, told how the draining of marshes had made a particular locality more susceptible to freezing, and speculated that lands became warmer when the clearing of forests exposed them to sunlight. Prior to the 20th century Regional changes, antiquity through 19th century įrom ancient times, people suspected that the climate of a region could change over the course of centuries. This last effect is currently causing global warming, and "climate change" is often used to describe human-specific impacts. Climate change is caused by factors that include oceanic processes (such as oceanic circulation), biotic processes (e.g., plants), variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions, and human-induced alterations of the natural world. It may be a change in average weather conditions or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions (such as more or fewer extreme weather events). Research during this period has been summarized in the Assessment Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Ĭlimate change, broadly interpreted, is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. Research has expanded our understanding of causal relations, links with historic data, and abilities to measure and model climate change. Since the 1990s, scientific research on climate change has included multiple disciplines and has expanded. By the 1990s, as the result of improving the fidelity of computer models and observational work confirming the Milankovitch theory of the ice ages, a consensus position formed: greenhouse gases were deeply involved in most climate changes and human-caused emissions were bringing discernible global warming. Some scientists also pointed out that human activities that generated atmospheric aerosols (e.g., "pollution") could have cooling effects as well.ĭuring the 1970s, scientific opinion increasingly favored the warming viewpoint. In the 1960s, the evidence for the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing. Many other theories of climate change were advanced, involving forces from volcanism to solar variation. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth's energy balance and climate. ![]() The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect was first identified.
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