ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the history of global warming and climate change in general. The discovery of global warming is an epic story: the struggle of thousands of men and women over the course of a century for very high stakes. For some, the work required actual physical courage, a risk to life and limb in icy lands or on the high seas. By the late 1970s global temperatures had begun to rise again. Some climate scientists predicted that an unprecedented global warming would become apparent around the year 2000. Their worries finally caught wide public attention in the summer of 1988, the hottest on record till then. Computer modeler James Hansen made headlines when he told a Congressional hearing and journalists that greenhouse warming was almost certainly underway. A large international meeting of scientists in Toronto called on the world to undertake active steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
