When did global warming start becoming an issue?

Question

When did global warming start becoming an issue?

Answer 1

After 1970's because it was the heated topic of GLOBAL COOLING there.

Answer 2

WHEN AL GORE MADE IT AN ISSUE.

BUT IT REALLY NOT IMPORTANT.

Answer 3

When the liberal parts of society needed something else to blame humanity with. When I was younger, they tried the fimbulwinter issue - turned out we were in the midst of a warming spell.  They tried the hole in the ozone thing - turned out it was a naturally-occuring phenomenom that ebbs and flows. They then tried the El Nino problem - turned out it was also a natural issue that ebbs and flows. Now they're trying for global warming, but they'll be wrong about that also.

Read the latest in science headlines - most solar scientists think we may be in for a "minimal ice age" because it looks like we're entering another "Maunder minimum" era.

Answer 4

It became an issue when the radical Democrats (not the sane ones, but the wacko left) realized they have nothing. No cause. No anything. They needed something to stand for other than higher taxes. So they invented global warming. I don't mean normal temp changes, but that man is causing it, and all that c**p. I don't blame them, they really had nothing else, and I give them credit for making something up that many people actually are buying. I would say there was no global warming before 9/11, and then emergency level man made global hysteria soon after that. Good question.

Answer 5

It became an issue for me when proponents began pushing for legislation to control and tax me.  So much for the separation of church and state...

Answer 6

2005

Answer 7

I was informed that heat dissipated therefore the earths core was cooling. So I take it it is the greenhouse effect that is "warming" the globe. I am sure that the world saviours The great old U.S. of a will find a way of making a hole in the green house

Answer 8

I think it's always been an issues it's just that it's only now that we are starting to acknowledge it and seriously do something about it.

Although have you noticed that is only the public that are encouraged to take action not business's'? There is no legislation stating business's have to recycle or will be charged for the amount of rubbish they throw out!

Answer 9

It has been a serious issue in the past, causing major extinctions on the planet millions of years ago:

http://www.killerinourmidst.com/P-T%20bo...

"An even larger amount of carbon dioxide (CO¸2) would also have been expelled by Traps volcanism. But in contrast to the sulfate aerosols, carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for extended periods of time (centuries), though it decreases slowly over that interval. As a greenhouse gas, it warms the atmosphere, changing ecological conditions. (Deccan Traps volcanism, coming before the end of the Cretaceous, is estimated to have warmed the world by 3° to 5°C, or 5.4° to 9°F; Ravizza and Peucker-Ehrenbrink, 2003.) And because it combines chemically to form carbonic acid, it also produces mildly acidic rain. Acid rain can dissolve calcium carbonate shells, particularly those at or near the ocean surface.  Additionally, acid rain leaches vital nutrients from the soil, resulting in plant stunting and death."

The progression in scientific understanding on the current global warming is summarized in detail on this site:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.h...

Answer 10

like four years ago.

Answer 11

When Governments realised how much money they could snatch back through environmental taxes, which just goes into their war chests. The U.K. government has blamed global warming on fossil fuels, rubbish tips, even blamed the poor cows for f@rting. There is more hot air that comes from Westminster, than it comes from a cows bum.

Answer 12

my dad has a great collection of National Geographics and recently found an artical from the early/mid 1960s (1964?) that quotes evidence of global warming due to retreating glaciers.

Answer 13

when the last ice-age disappeared. something melted the ice, and it wasn't 4x4's in those days mmmmmm?????

Answer 14

Well i know global warming started around 100+ years ago.. they realized that the world temperatures were rising around 40 years ago.. and people were starting to take it more seriously around 10 years ago!!

Answer 15

It was first made a political issue in UK in the early '80's by Margaret Thatcher. She didn't trust the Middle East or the miners, and wanted to justify an increase in nuclear power

Answer 16

When the political Left realised they could gain power, control and tax money by making it an issue.

Answer 17

It depends what you mean by "issue."  

Some of the science behind the idea of global warming dates from the early 1800s.  But as a political issue, "global warming" or the issue of global climate change is much more recent than that.

I believe it was French scientist Joseph Fourier, in 1824, who first pointed out that the Earth's surface temperature was much warmer than physics and astronomy alone would lead scientists to expect.  

In addition to the sun's rays warming the planet, Fourier argued, the blanket of gases present in the atmosphere somehow was acting to keep some of the sun's heat from radiating back into outer space as it normally would.  Fourier labeled this heat-trapping phenomenon the "greenhouse" effect.

Later in the 1800s interest in the "greenhouse effect" grew, largely because geologists became aware of the past ice ages that had ravaged the northern hemisphere, and other scientists became interested in the question of how ice ages came and went.

In the late 1800s, the Irish scientist John Tindall investigated a number of gases in the atmosphere, including water vapor & carbon dioxide and methane, to determine which ones had a "greenhouse" quality.  

Tindall identified water vapor in particular, but also CO2 and methane, as having the quality of being transparent to sunlight [that is, electro-magnetic radiation at relatively high wavelengths], but opaque to infrared radiation [that is, EM radiation at relatively low wavelenths].  

Because "greenhouse" gases absorbed IR rays but let through visible light, Tindall reasoned, their presence in the atmosphere essentially allowed solar energy to enter the planetary system and kept infrared heat waves from being sent back into space.

"Global warming" was still not considered to be a problem when Tindall was studying it, however, and the role of CO2 in causing global warming was not especially emphasized.

But in the 1890s, the Nobel prize-winning chemist Svante Arrhenius concluded that because of human civilization digging up large volumes of coal, a fossil fuel, and burning it, humanity was increasing the concentration of "greenhouse" gases in the air and therefore gradually warming up the planet.  

Initially, though, Arrhenius was far from being critical of this coal-generated "greenhouse effect."  Instead, he thought it would be a good thing, since it would help to stave off future ice ages.  Later in his career, Arrhenius did decide that the burning of coal and other fossil fuels was out of control, but mostly because he worried that humanity would run out of the stuff pretty quickly.

Various scientists criticized Arrhenius's scientific conclusions in the early 1900s, however, in part because they saw the energy-absorption bands produced by water vapor and CO2 as being virtually identifical.  Given the huge amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, they further reasoned, and given the very low concentration of CO2, adding to CO2 levels should have virtually no effect on the amount of IR radiation being absorbed, since the effect of the water vapor would overwhelm it.

However, the heat waves and droughts of the 1930s helped to revive some interest in the notion of the "greenhouse effect" or "global warming," which was defended by English scientist Guy Callendar.

Then during World War II, as air warfare became important for the Allies as well as the Axis powers, interest in meteorology and atmospheric research grew steadily, mostly because rival military powers wanted to be able to predict the kinds of weather conditions that would make for good bombing raids.  

According to Spencer Weart of the American Society for Physics, who is the author of a book called "The Discovery of Global Warming," military and governmental interest in climate questions then continued to grow after WW II  as the Cold War and the age of nuclear weapons took shape in the 1940s and 1950s.

It was during the 1950s that a major pioneer in the GW theory, American scientist Charles Keeling, got a government grant to study "baseline" carbon dioxide levels around the world, as a way of putting science's approach to CO2 studies on a firmer basis.

  Sponsored by another American scientist, Roger Revelle, who had his own suspicions about global warming, Keeling in 1958 began his famous observations of CO2 levels at the big observatory at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The data collected there over the past several decades has showed CO2 levels in the atmosphere, averaged on a yearly basis, to be risising steadily, year after year.

But Keeling's CO2 measurements, although dramatic enough to excite many scientists, didn't at first seem to correspond to any "warming" that the greenhouse effect was supposed to be generating.

As so-called global warming "contrarians" love to point out, average yearly temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, after rising slowly from 1850 through around 1945, suddenly started to cool and continued to cool from 1945 through around 1975.  The cooling happened, moreover, even as Keeling's measurements showed atmospheric CO2 levels to be rising.

Global warming researchers now reason that major volcanoes in this era, coupled with heavy emissions of industrial pollution into the air by Western and also Soviet industry, created a "parasol" effect in this time period because of all the reflective dust and sulfur dioxide aerosols that volcanic eruptions and industrial air pollution threw into the air.  

Global climate modelers now think the dust and the aerosol droplets in the high stratosphere functioned as tiny mirrors, reflecting some of the sun's rays back into space before they could strike the earth, and that this temporarily masked the underlying "greenhouse effect" caused by coal and oil burning.  

The temperature data in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s therefore gave the impression that the planet was cooling, not warming up.

During the 1970s, therefore, there were some scientists [including Dr. Stephen Schneider, who is now concerned about global warming!] who issued warnings about the quick arrival of a new ice age.  Newsweek magazine -- in 1971, I think it was, although it may have been later -- also ran a rather famous cover story on this threat.

But by around 1975, the "parasol" effect caused by air pollution and volcanoes began to abate, and some meteorologists [including Dr. Stephen Schneider] again began to focus on "global warming" due to greenhouse gases.  

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, for instance, issued the first of several reports on "greenhouse warming" and its risks in the late 1970s and followed this with at least one other report in the early 1980s.  

The scientific evidence was still too tentative to say that global warming was definitedly underway, the NAS reports indicated at this time - but there were reasons to think that the "greenhouse effect" was going to change things, and a number of risks might well flow from such a change.

It was during the remarkably hot summer of 1988 that real public concern about "global warming" hit the headlines in the United States, when the government climate researcher Dr. James Hansen, of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a congressional hearing that the evidence seemed to show that "global warming" was underway and could be detected.

Dr. Hansen's statements triggered major newspaper headlines around the world, and in the uproar a rather reluctant White House, led by George Busy's father George H.W. Bush, agreed to a series of negotiations on climate issues that led in 1989 to the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Since the formation of the IPCC, most climate scientists have become more and more concerned about global warming, although there is a small and stubborn minority that continues to deny the issue is important.  

Why have most of the climate scientists, including some former "greenhouse skeptics," basically come to believe in the IPCC's warnings?

As various writers on this subject have pointed out, one early controversy about GW was how to detect it, since there is quite a lot of natural variation in the earth's average temperature from year to year.

Before and even after Dr. Hansen spoke out in 1988, many skeptical scientists argued that it was far too soon for the "signal" of GW heating to be distinguished from the "noise" of natural variations.

But as American science writer William Stevens has pointed out in his book "The Change in the Weather," the climate researcher Benjamin Santer won over many of the doubters in the mid-1990s by identifying a  possible "greenhouse warming fingerprint" - a greater warming of the earth's troposphere, or lower atmosphere, in relation to the stratosphere, or upper atmosphere -- that would arise from "greenhouse" gases functioning as hypothesized.  This odd warming pattern in the atmosphere would arise if CO2 and other greenhouse gases were trapping Infrared rays and warming the planet as expected, Dr. Santer reasoned, but the same pattern would not result from merely random fluctuations in average warmth, or from the effects of solar energy increasing in intensity.

In the late 1990s, then, improvements in weather balloons and satellite measures made it possible for Santer's "greenhouse fingerprint" to be detected, William Stevens reports.  Therefore, there has been a growing agreement among climate scientists (from about 1995 on) that "global warming" from "anthropogenic" or human causes is real, and that it's not changes in sunlight

Answer 18

In 1895 a Swedish scientist first proposed the hypothesis that if "humans" keep releasing carbon into the atmosphere we will eventually warm the globe up.

The "global cooling" hypothesis was proposed in the early 1960's and was proven a theory by the end of that decade. Global cooling is based on the fact, there were no pollution controls going on, that allowed large amounts of particulate matter into the atmosphere and also other compounds like aerosols, that were actually blocking out solar radiation.

Answer 19

20 million years ago

Answer 20

Well, it became an issue when politicians realised that man had lost the plot, we were not  as individuals in control, they then had control and could not only tell us what to do, despite not doing it themselves, but also reintroduce Nuclear Power!!

Answer 21

When governments realised that they could use this to control and scare the populous and also make some cash back on it at the same time ....Nice one eh !!

Answer 22

in the last ten to fifteen yrs  or even less

Answer 23

if you read scientific reports, these guys realised that the natural process of melting and re-freezing of the ice caps wasnt happening. well, it was melting, but not refreezing, then the CO2 levels were measured, and by using the antarctica ice, the scientists measure the co2 from like 100 thousand years ago. they also measured global tempurature over the last 100 years. when they realized that there was a connection, they went to congress, but were laughed at and then lost their careers becuase they were called crackpots. however, more and more scientists have seen the same connection. we call it global warming. natural CO2 levels have been able to balance by plants sucking it up. but with all the co2 from trucks, trians, cars, planes, boats, factories, and houses has been overwhelming and theres not enough plant life to get rid of all of it. so it thickens the atmosphere and heat from the earth cant evaporate out into space. kinda like puttin a lid on boiling water and welding it on.

Answer 24

Few Years Ago