al gore’s film an inconvenient truth documented the effect of ________ on climate temperature

This was perhaps the most significant warning our species, as a whole, has yet been given. The report the IPCC issued that year was able to assert that 'the balance of evidence suggests' that human activity was increasing the planet’s temperature and that it would be a serious problem. Most of all, they refined the supercomputer models of the earth’s atmosphere in an effort to predict the future of the world’s weather.īy 1995, the central Herculean tasks of both research and synthesis were largely complete.

For example, they studied the concentration of greenhouse gases in ancient air trapped in glacial cores, sampled the atmosphere with weather balloons, examined the relative thickness of tree rings, and observed the frequency of volcanic eruptions. Scientists used every means at their disposal to reconstruct the history of the earth’s climate and to track current changes. Under the auspices of the United Nations, scientists and governments set up a curious hybrid, the IPCC, to track and report on the progress of that research.įrom roughly 1988 to 1995, the hypothesis that burning coal and gas and oil in large quantities was releasing carbon dioxide and other gases that would trap the sun’s radiation on Earth and disastrously heat the planet remained just that: a hypothesis. 'More research' was the mantra everyone adopted, and funding for it flowed freely from governments and foundations. This bold announcement set off a scientific and political furor: many physicists and chemists played down the possibility of serious harm, and many governments, though feeling pressure to react, did little to restrain the use of fossil fuel. But global warming is by now a scientific field with a fairly extensive history, and that history helps set the new findings in context - a context that makes the new report no less terrifying but much more telling for its unstated political implications.Īlthough atmospheric scientists had studied the problem for decades, global warming first emerged as a public issue in 1988 when James Hansen, a NASA scientist, told Congress that his research, and the work of a handful of other scientists, indicated that human beings were dangerously heating the planet, particularly through the use of fossil fuels. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report in early February, it was greeted with shock: 'World Wakes to Climate Catastrophe,' reported an Australian paper.

Al gore’s film an inconvenient truth documented the effect of ________ on climate temperature