Concern over Global Warming first arised when?

Question

I was wondering when concern over Global Warming first started becoming a real world wide issue. And does anyone know who coined the term 'global warming'?

Answer 1

I can't answer the question but the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme established the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change in 1988.

As the name suggests the initial concern was climate change which was adversely affecting agriculture in several countries and it was thought that the reasons for this had to be understood better.  Since then hundreds of scientists from all over the world have contributed to the work in various ways.

Answer 2

About five years ago, after everybody had forgotten about the global cooling scare of the 60s.  

With the cool looking graphics that the global weather modeling crowd uses it's more impressive to scare us with.

Answer 3

During the 1930's and 40's people were seeing the same trend's and becoming concerned very similar to present day.

"Greenland was about as warm or warmer in the 1930’s and 40’s, and many of the glaciers were smaller than they are now. This was a period of rapid glacier shrinkage world-wide,followed by at least partial re-expansion during a colder period from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. Of course, we don’t know very much about how the glacier dynamics changed then because we didn’t have satellites to observe it. However, it does suggest that large variations in ice sheet dynamics can occur from natural climate variability. "

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007...

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Answer 4

It became an issue to the Caveman when all the mamoths started to die off!

Answer 5

Al Gore had a senior moment and put popcorn in his pancake mix instead of blueberries.  The pancakes flipped themselves, he screamed "Global Warming, Tipper', and the rest is cherry picking consensus based dribble.

Answer 6

In 1896 Nobel Prize winning Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius published a new idea. As humanity burned fossil fuels such as coal, which added carbon dioxide gas to the Earth's atmosphere, we would raise the planet's average temperature.  His original calculations of the heating effect of increased atmospheric carbon levels had fair agreement with modern computer models.

Edit: I love how I get a thumbs down rating when I give the correct answer with supporting evidence.  Yep, the doubters are certainly a rational scientifically unbiased group ;-)

Answer 7

The theory began in 1896, but the link to atmospheric measurements became more clear by the early 1960s:

"In 1896 a Swedish scientist published a new idea. As humanity burned fossil fuels such as coal, which added carbon dioxide gas to the Earth's atmosphere, we would raise the planet's average temperature. This "greenhouse effect" was only one of many speculations about climate, and not the most plausible. Scientists found good reason to believe that our emissions could not change the climate. Anyway major change seemed impossible except over tens of thousands of years.

In the 1930s, people realized that the United States and North Atlantic region had warmed significantly during the previous half-century. Scientists supposed this was just a phase of some mild natural cycle, with unknown causes. Only one lone voice, the amateur G.S. Callendar, insisted that greenhouse warming was on the way. Whatever the cause of warming, everyone thought that if it happened to continue for the next few centuries, so much the better.

In the 1950s, Callendar's claims provoked a few scientists to look into the question with improved techniques and calculations. What made that possible was a sharp increase of government funding, especially from military agencies with Cold War concerns about the weather and the seas. The new studies showed that, contrary to earlier crude estimates, carbon dioxide could indeed build up in the atmosphere and should bring warming. Painstaking measurements drove home the point in 1961 by showing that the level of the gas was in fact rising, year by year."

This year's CO2 Conference marks 50 years that detailed atmospheric measurement records have been in place:

http://co2conference.org/agenda.asp

Temperature records go back at least 125 years:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2...

Answer 8

Al Gore thinks he did...just like he thinks he invented the internet. hehe

To Mang:  Apparently you're in no mood for sarcasm and humor.  Take a pill before you have a stroke.

Answer 9

Coincidence.... After the fall of the Soviet Union...

Also, the first piece of the internet was the signal from sputnik and the USSR.... Lol

Answer 10

The concern arose in the early 1990's.  An unproven science was used to craft the Kyoto Protocol in order to force the United States into an economic recession.  At that time, all major industrialized nations were in a recession except for the US.  The US was was in an economic climb.  Only the US had to lose in signing that treaty.  In 1990, Germany was reunified, and the USSR collapsed.  These two events also meant a very large number of inefficient factories in East Germany and the USSR were closed down.  That is why goals always reference 1990.  There is zero chance of any global treaty being signed that used any baseline after 1990.

Since then, the idea of global warming has evolved into a fear mongering tactic to push citizens into given governments greater ability to tax and control lifestyles.  If the concern was geniune, the the world would focus its attention on China which is building TWO coal fired power plants every week.

Answer 11

Its not so much a term as a scientific label

I know that people in the 70's/80's spotted the trends. I have forgotten the exact dates- but its been known about for decades, but its only in the last 2-3 years that its become a major issue.

at the above poster -

I suggest you look in to Al Gore and the internet. He a) did not claim to invent it, he said he facilitated it , (b) The inventors of the internet have pointed at time and time again that without him it would have been a lot harder. By all means argue against Al Gore- but dont lie.

Answer 12

It has been known for decades, but nobody really worried much about it partly because it was a small problem and partly because nobody knew how to generate as much energy as our modern society needs without emitting lots of CO2. We still don't know how to do that. But it became big front page news because of AL Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth".