The latest IPCC report on climate change is the most terrifying yet. It comes after more than 150 years of warnings.

The newest alarm from scientists is far from the first. A timeline of such calls to action demonstrates just how long the world has been dragging its heels on climate.

The world is on the verge of passing a crucial climate threshold within about a decade, sharply increasing the chance of catastrophic warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in its latest report, released Monday.

The analysis found that the global average temperature will likely exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels — the ambitious limit set by the Paris Agreement — by the first half of the 2030s. It stressed that the world’s poorest areas are at increasing risk, with almost half the population living in “highly vulnerable” areas, where deaths from floods, droughts and storms were 15 times as high over the past decade as they were elsewhere.

The science group’s sixth major report comes after another unsettling year for the climate — a sweltering, drying, melting, burning summer in 2022, a mixed but largely disappointing result at the U.N. climate conference in Egypt, another top-10 average temperature year with the promise of new records to come.

The recent extremes may seem like they are arriving in rapid-fire fashion, taking some by surprise — but the planet’s shift into a new climate, shaped by fossil fuel use and other human activities, has been a long time coming. So have the warnings about humanity’s potential to alter the climate, which date back more than 150 years.

Grid looked back through the impressively long timeline of the people and organizations that have called attention to the problem and urged action.

Eunice Newton Foote's 1856 paper on the greenhouse effect made her a climate change pioneer.

1856: Eunice Newton Foote shows what’s coming

CO2 in the atmosphere: 286 parts-per-million

Three years before a more famous paper by John Tyndall demonstrated the specifics of the greenhouse effect, amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote wrote “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.” She placed thermometers into glass cylinders and filled them with normal air, moist air and then “carbonic-acid gas,” or carbon dioxide. She found that the CO2 caused the air to heat up much more and to cool down more slowly — the first time a scientist predicted the greenhouse effect that drives climate change.

Archival black and white photo of man sitting for a portrait holding a walking stick — Svante Arrhenius, Swedish physicist and chemist, sits for a portrait circa 1903.

1895: Svante Arrhenius mainstreams the science

CO2 in the atmosphere: 295 ppm

This Swedish scientist published “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground” in 1895. He calculated that if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere tripled, it could raise the temperature in the Arctic by as much as 9 degrees C (16.2 F). CO2 has increased faster than he anticipated thanks to the increased burning of fossil fuels, but his warming numbers were a bit too aggressive — still an important and impressive warning from well over a century ago.

1912: Popular Mechanics issues a coal warning

CO2 in the atmosphere: 300 ppm

The March 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics featured a discussion of “The Remarkable Weather of 1911″ and whether human activities might be capable of changing the climate. It contained some rough, round numbers for coal usage, along with a prescient conclusion: “It may well be that the enormous present-day combustion of coal is producing carbon dioxide so fast that it that it will have important climatic effects.” The article took a bit of a detour to conclude, though, suggesting that generations to come “shall enjoy milder breezes and live under sunnier skies.”

Chart displays y axis of CO2 Concentration (ppm) and x axis ranging from 1960 to 2023, with graph line rising from 315 ppm in 1960 to 420 ppm in 2023 — Chart displaying steady increase in carbon dioxide concentration at Mauna Loa Observatory from 1960s to present day.

1960: First publication of Keeling Curve measurements

CO2 in the atmosphere: 320 ppm

Charles David Keeling began systematically measuring the level of CO2 in the atmosphere in early 1958 at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Only two years later, in the first publication using that data, he had observed slight increases in each subsequent year, along with seasonal variations. Those observed increases, at about 1.2 PPM per year, have accelerated since then, but Keeling’s measurements have proved crucial for demonstrating the steady march of climate change.

Archive black and white photo of two men sitting in the White House, Lyndon Johnson on the right — President Lyndon Johnson meets with Science Adviser Donald Hornig at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5, 1966.

1965: Report to President Johnson

CO2 in the atmosphere: 322 ppm

In a document entitled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” members of President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee wrote that burning of fossil fuels had likely already raised the global temperature by half a degree Celsius. “Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment,” they noted, offering up some reasonably accurate predictions for future warming. The document also predicted the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets if CO2 concentrations rose more quickly — which they have.

1983: The Environmental Protection Agency sounds the alarm

CO2 in the atmosphere: 346 ppm

A couple of decades after the report to Johnson, the science had been refined to the point that an EPA report could predict a 2 degrees C temperature increase by the middle of the following century — which is more or less what we’re headed for at the moment. “The shift away from fossil fuels perhaps could be instituted more gradually and therefore less expensively if energy policies were adopted now rather than several decades later,” the authors wrote. Whoops.

1988: James Hansen testifies to Congress

CO2 in the atmosphere 354 ppm

“Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming,’’ said NASA scientist James Hansen. “It is already happening now.” Hansen famously testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, marking a sort of birth of the modern era of climate change — and congressional inaction on the problem.

1990: The Pentagon sees a problem

CO2 in the atmosphere: 357 ppm

While much of the U.S. government has lagged behind the science when it comes to the threat of climate change, the military has been clear-eyed about it for decades. In 1990, a Naval War College report found that naval operations could be “drastically affected by the impact of global climate change.” Later, in 2007, the Pentagon began referring to warming as a “threat multiplier” capable of taking risky geopolitical situations and making them worse.

2006: The Stern Review makes the economic case

CO2 in the atmosphere: 385 ppm

U.K. economist Nicholas Stern led a massive, 700-page analysis of the economic effects of climate change. Its conclusions were stark: “The benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting.” It estimated the costs of climate change of at least 5 percent of global GDP but stressed that there was still time to stave off warming’s most dire effects.

Protester in a crowd holds a mask of Barack Obama in front of his face — A protester wears a mask depicting President Barack Obama during a protest march toward the U.N. climate change conference on Dec. 12, 2009, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

2009: President Obama travels to Copenhagen

CO2 in the atmosphere: 391 ppm

With negotiations at 2009′s COP15 climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, hanging in the balance, President Barack Obama traveled to Denmark to help finalize an accord and unite people into action. In a speech to the conference, He stressed that “bold” and “decisive” action was possible but that there remained a real risk of “having the same stale arguments month after month, year after year — all while the danger of climate change grows until it is irreversible.”

2018: The IPCC’s 1.5 degrees report

CO2 in the atmosphere: 412 ppm

The U.N.’s climate science body, the IPCC, releases massive, comprehensive reports on the climate every six years or so. In 2018, a few years after the landmark (but somewhat toothless) Paris Agreement was signed, the IPCC released an interim report about the possibility of reaching 1.5 degrees of warming, up from the approximately 1 degrees C at the time — and the news was not good. It estimated that 1.5 degrees could be breached as soon as 2030, offering a stark deadline. “Every extra bit of warming matters,” one of its authors said.

2022: The “climate president” sets the tone

CO2 in the atmosphere: 420 ppm

After the apparent collapse of Senate negotiations around a package of climate change legislation, President Joe Biden traveled to Massachusetts to speak about the issue. “It is literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger,” he said. The Inflation Reduction Act did eventually make it through Congress, signaling to many that the world’s second-largest emitter might finally be getting serious about tackling climate change — though there have been some hiccups since. Whether the legislation and other moves can really meet the goal of a halving of 2005 emissions by 2030 remains to be seen.

2023: The IPCC’s sixth synthesis report

CO2 in the atmosphere: 421 ppm

The IPCC’s sixth full report on the science of climate change underscored how urgent the issue has become after more than a century and a half of accumulating calls to action. The authors stressed, though, that hope is still, after all this time, not yet lost. “This Synthesis Report,” said IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee, “underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a livable sustainable future for all.”

Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.

Home

The latest IPCC report on climate change is the most terrifying yet. It comes after more than 150 years of warnings.