News
Climate Questions: How do we know humans triggered warming?
Call it Law and Order: Climate Change. Scientists used detective work to pinpoint the prime suspect in Earth’s warming: us. They proved it couldn’t be anything but carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
State of Play
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.