"Intelligence in plants and vegetables is an old story, Mr. Scott.
Older even than the animal arrogance that has overlooked it."
- Dr. Carrington to Mr. Scott, (1951) The Thing From Another Planet
As valuable as this review is, it is mostly focused on recent "public" opinion history and most of that is tangled around an arrogant disbelief in science that is well over 100 years old.
The first suspicions we had that our burning of coal and oil could have an effect on our planet started in the mid 1800's when British physicist John Tyndall built the first spectrophotometer to measure the absorption of light by various gases found in our atmosphere.
Tyndall discovered that CO2(*) demonstrated a deep area of absorption in the long wave infrared range.
In his paper discussing these observations, published in 1861, he asks out loud if this could have contributed to the "mutation" as he used to describe the glacial periods of our planetary climate.
In 1896, Norwegian physicist Svante Arrhenius would publish the first energy balance model for the Earth. In his model he would postulate that if you doubled the atmospheric CO2 that the surface temperature would rise between two and four degrees Celsius.
There is actual "debate" within the climate science community but the nature and character of this debate is not what the general public sees. The public is brazenly told that the debate concerns the existence of the planetary heating and its anthropogenic causes. The actual debate is about the speed and magnitude of these changes we are indicting upon ourselves and our generations to come.
(*) before anyone in the DU Universe raises the point of the absorption of water vapor I would point out that while water vapor is a green-house gas, its absorption is limited and overwhelmed by the absorption by CO2 and CH4. We classify water vapor as a 'condensing' green-house gas, a classification not applied to any other gas in our planets atmosphere.
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