In Chapters 11 and 12, we explored our options for addressing climate change. We can adapt to the change, we can mitigate it by reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases, or we can geoengineer the climate. In Chapter 14, I will pull all these together so we can explore how we can choose among these options. Before we get to that discussion, though, I describe the context of the policy debate by providing a brief history of climate change science, policy, and politics.

The beginning of climate science

People have been speculating on the nature of the climate for millennia, but modern climate science began in earnest two centuries ago, in the early 19th century. In the 1820s, mathematician Joseph Fourier provided one of the first descriptions of the physics of what we now know as the greenhouse effect: A planet's atmosphere can trap heat and warm the surface of the planet beyond what it would be if it were a bare, airless rock (we covered this physics in Chapter 4). Several decades later, in 1859, physicist John Tyndall discovered that it was primarily water vapor and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that provided the warmth, despite that fact that these two constituents make up just a small fraction of the atmosphere.