Renewable Revolution

 
 If you spend any amount of time talking climate change online, before long you’ll run into someone who thinks they’re clever in pointing out that They used to call it global warming, but then when it stopped warming, they switched to climate change! There are a number of ways in which this can easily be proven wrong. One is to point out that the IPCC was never the IPGW. Another is to point out that it was actually GOP messaging guru Frank Luntz   who recommended they use “climate change” because it didn’t sound as ominous as “global warming.” 
 
Now there’s a resource that shows that the concept of climatic change (as opposed to global warming) is over a century old. Brad Johnson has put together a timeline of climate change science, dating back to John Tyndall’s work in 1861 and ending with the Clean Air Act Amendments in 1990.
 
So in response to those who claim that climate science is still in its infancy and in no way certain, we can point out that the hypothesis emerged before cars did. In 1882 H.A. Phillips wrote a letter to Nature warning us that “increasing pollution of the atmosphere will have a marked influence on the climate.”
 
By the 1920s, warnings of coal combustion changing the climate began appearing in the popular press. In the 1950s, the greenhouse metaphor was in full force, with both the Washington Post and New York Times running stories with the sort of straightforward reporting one still occasionally wishes were more common. “Industrial Gases Warming Up Earth, Physicist Notes Here” said the Post, while the Times ran a story headlined “Why Earth Warms; Scientist Blames Man-Made Changes on Earth’s Surface.”
 
There’s even a video from 1958 that warns its viewers that the expected few degrees of warming from car and industry emissions would melt the polar ice caps and “tourists in glass bottom boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” 


Despite our scientists knowing of this problem for over a century, Ralph Keeling concludes a statement on annual CO2 concentrations by pointing out that “we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm this year – or ever again for the indefinite future.”
 
Thankfully, the Paris agreement does look like it will go into effect this year, and India’s Parliament just ratified it, so that’s progress.
 
But think where we’d be if oil, gas and coal money hadn’t fueled a decades-long misinformation effort to deny the evidence scientists spent a century compiling.