In recent years, the problem of climate change has leapt to the forefront of the political, public and media agenda. We are talking about a challenge that needs urgent solutions and, although denialist beliefs persist, the world is increasingly aware of the need to act.
However, the concept of climate change is not something new, and we have to go back to nothing more and nothing less than the 19th century to meet the first scientific voices that began to consider the effect of human activity on the global temperature of the planet. .
In 1824, Jean-Baptiste Fourier, a French physicist, began to compare our atmosphere to a greenhouse to explain the temperature of the planet. Years later, the scientist Eunice Foote was the first to directly relate what was then called carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) with the increase in temperature of the atmosphere. Her work, like that of other women of science of the time, was ignored and it is the Englishman John Tydall who is credited with this.
When did the increase in carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere begin to be related to human action, and to make predictions about the effects on the planet’s global temperature? One of the first was Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist who calculated with great precision the degrees that the temperature would increase if the amount of carbon dioxide that was in the atmosphere at that time doubled. He also proposed, at the end of the 19th century, that the burning of fossil fuels causes global warming due to the greenhouse effect.
As we can see, scientists have been warning for many years (more than a century!) Of the consequences of the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities , and only now it seems that, very timidly, the world reacts.
The literature related to climate change is very abundant and it is very difficult to make a correct selection, but in this gallery we have wanted to show a list of publications of an informative nature that can serve concerned readers to find out, with all possible rigor, about current knowledge on the matter, as well as the different predictions, scenarios, causes and solutions related to what is surely one of the great challenges of our era.
