History of Climate Change       Throughout history, Earth has undergone a  great deal of climate change. From the scorching surface temperatures of new born Earth to the protracted ice age of the Paleoproterozoic era,  Earth has had its fair share of extreme weather. It wasn’t until the dawn of the second industrial revolution and the rapid spike in the industrial use of coal that the sudden threat of human exacted global warming was sparked (“The Past”).      At the beginning of the 19th century, a man named Joseph Fourier discovered that the Earth’s atmosphere was the reason the planet retains heat the way it does, and that without this atmosphere there would be nothing to shield Earth’s surface from the rigid cold of outer-space (“The Past”). Later in the 19th century Irish physicist John Tyndall, discovered that the properties of some atmospheric gasses such as carbon dioxide (CO2) were to blame for this retention of heat by Earth’s atmosphere (“The Past”). He found that these gasses were transparent to visible light but absorbed infrared radiation instead, hindering any heat from escaping (“The Past”). In this way, the sunlight hitting Earth’s surface and rebounding in heat radiation was being absorbed by these gasses. These gasses, in turn, were heating the atmosphere (Pappas).      This early discovery of the correlation between atmospheric composition and the surface temperature of Earth was key in the later discovery of how the excess production of greenhouse gasses could and would cause global warming over time. Near the turn of the 20th century, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, said that low CO2 levels could have caused the ice ages to happen, and that the use of coal for industrial work could cause a reverse effect, triggering temperatures on Earth to rise (qtd. in “The Past”).      The evidence from these discoveries made little to no difference: Humanity continued to market and burn fossil fuels. In the early stages of fossil fuel use, emissions were rather low, standing at about 2bn tons of CO2 annually but by the 1950’s, emissions had tripled, and today humanity sees emissions twenty times that of the early 1900’s (“The Past”). The mass production of motorized vehicles, aircraft, trains, etc., which all relied on fossil fuels to run, were contributing greatly to this global influx of CO2 into the atmosphere.