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History of climate change science
The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change the climate. Many other theories of climate change were advanced, involving forces from volcanism to solar variation. In the 1960s, the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing, although some scientists also pointed out that human activities, in the form of atmospheric aerosols (''e.g.,'' "pollution"), could have cooling effects as well. During the 1970s, scientific opinion increasingly favored the warming viewpoint. By the 1990s, as a result of improving fidelity of computer models and observational work confirming the Milankovitch theory of the ice ages, a consensus position formed: greenhouse gases were deeply involved in most climate changes, and human emissions were bringing serious global warming.
Since the 1990s, scientific research on climate change has included multiple disciplines and has expanded, significantly increasing our understanding of causal relations, links with historic data and ability to numerically model climate change. The most recent work has been summarized in the Assessment Reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions (i.e., more or fewer extreme weather events). Climate change is caused by factors that include oceanic processes (such as oceanic circulation), biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions, and human-induced alterations of the natural world; these latter effects are currently causing global warming, and "climate change" is often used to describe human-specific impacts.
== Regional changes, antiquity through 19th century ==
From ancient times, people suspected that the climate of a region could change over the course of centuries. For example, Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle, told how the draining of marshes had made a particular locality more susceptible to freezing, and he speculated that lands became warmer when the clearing of forests exposed them to sunlight. Renaissance and later scholars saw that deforestation, irrigation, and grazing had altered the lands around the Mediterranean since ancient times; they thought it plausible that these human interventions had affected the local weather. Vitruvius, in the first century BC, describes a series of ancient cities that lined the Anatolian peninsula from south to north along the Aegean sea, he then comments that they long ago were engulfed by the seas - presently these ancient cities are again out of water .
The most striking change came in the 18th and 19th centuries, obvious within a single lifetime: the conversion of Eastern North America from forest to croplands. By the early 19th century many believed the transformation was altering the region's climate—probably for the better. When sodbusters took over the Great Plains they were told that "rain follows the plough." Not everyone agreed. Some experts reported that deforestation not only caused rainwater to run off rapidly in useless floods, but reduced rainfall itself. European professors, alert to any proof that their nations were wiser than others, claimed that the Orientals of the Ancient Near East had heedlessly converted their once lush lands into impoverished deserts.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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