Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
From ancient times, people suspected that the climate of a region could change over the course of centuries. For example, Theophrastus, a pupil of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC, told how the draining of marshes had made a particular locality more susceptible to freezing, and speculated that lands became warmer when the clearing of forests exposed them to sunlight.
This phenomenon is popularly known as global dimming, [48] and is primarily attributed to sulfate aerosols produced by the combustion of fossil fuels with heavy sulfur concentrations like coal and bunker fuel. [9] Smaller contributions come from black carbon, organic carbon from combustion of fossil fuels and biofuels, and from anthropogenic dust.
This forces a change in tax policy in the British Empire, which was a cause of the American War of Independence. 1783 The volcano Laki erupts, emitting sufficient sulfur dioxide gas and sulphate particles to kill a majority of Iceland's livestock and cause an unusually cold winter in Europe and Western Asia. 1789 1793
These historical impacts of climate change can improve human life and cause societies to flourish, or can be instrumental in civilization's societal collapse. The study seeks to define periods in human history where temperature or precipitation varied from what is observed in the present day.
Climate changes of 535-536 (535–536 AD), sudden cooling and failure of harvests, perhaps caused by volcanic dust 900–1300 Medieval Warm Period , wet in Europe, arid in North America, may have depopulated the Great Plains of North America, associated with the Medieval renaissances in Europe
For more than 100 years, scientists have known that large quantities of greenhouse gases, released from the burning of fossil fuels, go up into the atmosphere and heat the planet. Humans caused ...
Technological advances over several millennia gave humans increasing control over the environment. But it was the Western Industrial Revolution of the 18th to 19th centuries that tapped into the vast growth potential of the energy in fossil fuels. Coal was used to power ever more efficient engines and later to generate electricity.
[7] [32] [33] These calculations led him to conclude that human-caused CO 2 emissions, from fossil-fuel burning and other combustion processes, are large enough to cause global warming. This conclusion has been extensively tested, winning a place at the core of modern climate science.