Climate Change & Environmental Crisis

For hundreds of millions of years, dead organisms accumulated in the Earth's crust. Compressed by geological pressure, cooked by heat, they became coal, oil, and natural gas. These fossil fuels are, in effect, ancient sunlight stored as carbon. They sat underground, inert and harmless, for longer than any animal with a backbone has existed.

Then, over roughly two centuries, human beings dug them up and set them on fire.

The combustion of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other Gases in the Earth's atmosphere that trap heat from the sun, creating a warming effect. The most significant are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). While a natural greenhouse effect keeps the planet habitable, human activity has dramatically increased the concentration of these gases since the Industrial Revolution, intensifying the warming effect and destabilizing the climate system. into the atmosphere, where they trap heat radiating from the Earth's surface. The basic physics has been understood since the mid-nineteenth century. In 1856, the American scientist Eunice Newton Foote showed that CO2 traps heat. A male colleague had to present her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science; women could not present. Three years later, the Irish physicist John Tyndall ran more detailed experiments on infrared absorption, and his name stuck while Foote's was forgotten until scholars rediscovered her work in the 2010s. In 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated that doubling atmospheric CO2 would raise global temperatures by roughly 5 degrees Celsius. That was about double the modern best estimate of around 3 degrees, but as a first approximation from a man working with pencil and paper, it was remarkably close.