Peter Sinclair comes through with a good explanation of the history of concern about global warming — how the warming trend was discovered.
It wasn’t scientists trying to get government grants. It was the U.S. Air Force, trying to beat the commies and keep America safe for democracy and, ironically, safe for dissent from such applications of science.
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Real history couldn’t be published as fiction, which is one way we can tell real history from the stuff that gets made up. In the story told in this video, note carefully the serendipity of figuring out the CO2 issues: Who could invent a story about warfare leading to the discovery of global warming? As with the coincidence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both dying on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, no editor of fiction would accept it as believable.
More:
- Richard Alley‘s faculty site at Penn State; Alley’s page at the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State
- The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future, Richard B. Alley, Princeton University Press; Winner of 2001 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science, One of Choices Outstanding Academic Titles for 2001
- Site for a course called “Climate Change, Human Society and Earth,” in the Environmental Geology series in the Earth Sciences Department at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis); see especially “additional resources” on this page
- 2004 series of stories from NPR on the scientists studying climate change, including Richard Alley, John Christy at the University of Alabama, and Wallace Broecker at Columbia
Why we worry, why policy makers are involved: Carbon Emissions, 2000 – from WorldMapper, with a serendipitous tip of the old scrub brush to Petra Tschakert at Penn State.
Carbon Emissions 2000, from worldmapper.org - creative commons license
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 