1824 French mathematician and physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier first hypothesizes that the atmosphere plays a significant role in mediating temperature on Earth Fourier, in the article “General Remarks on …

1856 American scientist Eunice Foote predicts the warming impact of “carbonic acid” (carbon dioxide) on the atmosphere. Foote describes an experiment where she filled separate glass jars with water vapor, …

1861 Irish physicist John Tyndall demonstrates experimentally that water vapor and other gases warm the atmosphere John Tyndall, in the article “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases …

1904 Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius concludes that the Earth’s temperature might increase by 5 to 6 degrees Celsius with a doubling of atmospheric CO2 Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius follows early …

1938 English engineer and amateur meteorologist Guy Callendar concludes that humans have added about 150,000 million tonnes of CO2 to the air over the previous 50 years “The artificial production …

1951 American marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson publishes the New York Times bestseller The Sea Around Us, including observations about pronounced warming in the Arctic regions of the Earth …

1956 Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass publishes a lucid explanation of “carbon dioxide theory” to account for “the general warming of the climate that has taken place in the last sixty …

1956 The New York Times publishes a summary of the Gilbert Plass paper headlined “Warmer climate on the earth may be due to more carbon dioxide in the air” The …

1957 American oceanographers Roger Revelle and Hans Suess demonstrate that CO2 levels in the air have increased as a result of the use of fossil fuels Roger Revelle and Hans Suess …

1965 Roger Revelle contributes to the first mention of global warming in a government report, drawing an analogy between human-produced gases entering the global atmosphere and the effect of glass …

1967 Syukuro Manabe and Richard T. Wetherald are the first to use a computer model to explore the impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide on the Earth’s climate Syukuro Manabe …

1972 The Club of Rome publishes Limits to Growth, a report that predicts that if current growth trends continue unchanged, the limits to growth on the planet will be reached …

1976 Charles D. Keeling creates the “Keeling Curve,” a simple visualization of the longest continuous record of CO2 concentration in the world. A paper published by Charles D. Keeling of the Scripps …

1977 The U.S. National Academy of Sciences releases a report that identifies a global warming trend caused by increased use of fossil fuels, and predicts that global temperatures could rise …

Senior Exxon Corporation scientist James F. Black advises Exxon’s Management Committee that CO2 from the world’s use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity At …

A report of the Ad Hoc Study Group on carbon dioxide and climate for the National Research Council chaired by Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Jule Charney estimates “the most …

Three years after its first climate report, a second National Academy of Sciences report on anthropogenic warming, chaired by economist Thomas Schelling, stresses uncertainty about the extent and timing of …