Climate change is arguably among the most pressing societal challenges of our times, and now certainly the most well-known amongst the public. From initial observations of global warming and proposed ideas about the root causes, a steady consensus has built up that climate change is one of the most serious threats facing the world in the near future.
It is very clearly stated in the recently released 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the physical science basis, that global warming is mostly caused by human activities.
Climate sciences have an illustrious European history. In the 19th century, Germany’s Wladimir Köppen laid the foundations for climatology, while the French mathematician Joseph Fourier (1768 – 1830) postulated the natural greenhouse warming effect and speculated that human behavior could change a regions climate.
Swedish Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius made the first, and amazingly realistic, calculations in 1896 on how changes in the levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere could alter the temperature of the Earth’s surface.
In the 1930s the British scientist Guy Stewart Callendar demonstrated that global land
temperatures had increased over the previous 50 years and showed that this could
have been caused by anthropogenic CO2
emissions.
