The Earth! Humans are Back on Track: How much progress has been made?
By William DeLucia and Aden Hochberg Source: Newsweek
Over the years mankind has evolved from using the wheel to the wagon to the car. In the process of all this, we have subconsciously started a huge problem… climate change and global warming. But here on The Happy Trumpet, we do not share bad news with you. Today, we are going to show you a timeline with events in climate change history.
According to Newsweek, the idea of climate change has been around for centuries. Climate change first started to come to people's senses as a big problem in 1998, after a warning from James Hansen. Hansen played the role of the leader of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
As Newsweek recalls, In 1824, a French physicist called Joseph Fourier created the term “Greenhouse effect”. The Greenhouse effect is where the sun’s light energy goes through the atmosphere and is made into heat energy, which cannot come out of the lower atmosphere. He thought that there must be something in the atmosphere that is doing the job of a “tight cover.”
“A few years later, a scientist named Eunice Foote found out that this cover has CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) and Steam,” suggests Newsweek. The more CO2 and Steam there is, results in more heat in the earth’s atmosphere, thus, global warming. This is one reason why trees are so important. Trees and other plants absorb CO2 and produce oxygen, and that helps cool down the earth.
In 1896, the first “real” automobile was created, the Duryea Motor Wagon. One decade later, Svante Arrhenius, who was a Swedish chemist, thought that the fossil fuels burned by automobiles would be a huge factor in global warming. It was only in 1938, that a man by the name of Guy Callendar, who was a British Engineer, was able to show that global warming is connected to higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
The next step was to put measurement tests and recordings into place. These started in the 1950’s. In the 1960’s, a student named Syukuro Manabe, who was attending Princeton University, was a leader in the creation of the first physical models for climate change.
Now you may be wondering how to help the environment after reading this. You might not be able to do something revolutionary, but there are lots of small things you can do. Some small things may include turning off lights when you aren’t using them, composting, or even using rechargeable batteries. People have started to come together to help this situation, but we still have a lot of work to do.
