Today, climate change is a scientific dogma—questioning it is no longer seen as acceptable. But this wasn’t always the case. According to a recent American study, the effect of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere’s ability to retain heat wasn’t understood until the mid-19th century.
At the same time, the use of fossil fuels began rapidly increasing atmospheric CO₂ levels, but it would still take a long time before the phenomenon even became a subject of scientific concern—let alone the broad societal issue it is today, influencing a vast range of topics.
The study in question explored when climate change could have been detected if 19th-century scientists had access to today’s climate models and observational networks. To do this, the researchers assumed that by the year 1860, it would have been possible to make precise measurements of atmospheric temperature changes. They then determined when a human-caused climate signal would have become detectable.
According to the report, significant cooling of the middle to upper stratosphere—primarily caused by rising levels of CO₂ from human activity—would have been clearly detectable by around 1885. That’s during the height of European imperialism, and well before the invention of gasoline-powered cars.
These findings could have been made based on the favorable signal-to-noise ratio in the mid- to upper stratosphere, where the human-induced cooling is strong and displays distinct patterns that differ clearly from natural variability.
The researchers noted that atmospheric measurement capabilities in 1860 were far from global; high-quality stratospheric temperature measurements would have only existed for mid-latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Nevertheless, human-caused stratospheric cooling still would have been detectable by 1894—nearly a decade before the Wright brothers’ first flight.
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Donald Rumsfels said:"There are known knows and there are unknown knows, but there are also unknown unknows."
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