Happy holiday season! We hope this first issue finds you under blankets and holding a cup of something warm. Thanks for being here.

Welcome to Climatific, a free, weekly read on climate science emailed right to your inbox. We’re breaking it down so it makes sense- not for scientists or researchers, but for everyday people trying to understand the planet we live on, what’s happening to it, and why it matters.

The first issue discusses the origins of climate science, which trace back farther than you might think. We also fast forward through the recent history of the Earth’s climate to break down what’s happened since.

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What we read in the news sometimes suggests otherwise, but climate science is not new!

The first climate science research was published in 1856. This means that climate science is, literally, older than sliced bread (invented in 1928). It’s also older than the first World War (1914-1918), Alfred Hitchcock (born in 1899), and the diesel engine (1893). And probably your grandma.

We can thank American scientist and inventor Eunice Newton Foote. Like many others’ in the 1800s, Newton Foote’s research was inspired by an interest in the scientific community to understand the cause for historic changes in global temperature.

In 1856, Newton Foote was the first to test theories about how the climate works by measuring the temperatures of three glass cylinders according to three variables: air density, air humidity, and carbon dioxide concentration. The 2018 short film, Eunice, shows that her set up looked something like this:

Her experiment showed that the cylinder with increased carbon dioxide trapped the most heat, followed by the cylinder with increased air humidity and, last, air density.

Newton Foote was the first to associate increased carbon dioxide concentrations with atmospheric warming. She discovered what would later be coined the greenhouse gas effect- more on that in a bit. Acknowledgement for her work was given to the Smithsonian Institute’s first secretary John Henry because women were not permitted to present their own research.

This is probably why the work of Irish scientist John Tyndall that followed three years later is much more well-known. In 1859, Tyndall measured the radiative capacity of various gases- in other words, how much heat they’re capable of trapping. He found that carbon dioxide, water vapor, and ozone trap the most heat, and so he speculated that increased levels of these gases could be why the Earth has gotten hotter in the past.

Since humans like things in threes, the last fundamental climate research we’ll note is Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius. If you think his name sounds familiar, you’re probably right. Svante Arrhenius introduced us to many of the fundamentals of chemistry, like the Arrhenius equation, which you probably learned about in high school chemistry class. Or maybe you were throwing spitballs at your friends.

In either case, the Arrhenius equation relates the temperature of a reaction to the rate at which it happens. Hotter temperatures speed up reactions. Arrhenius was also the first person to explore the impacts of doubling carbon dioxide concentrations on the atmosphere. In 1896, he discovered that there is a correlation between certain gases and increasing temperature. Arrhenius went on to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903 for this discovery and others.

We’ve come to refer to these gases collectively as ‘greenhouse gases’ because their heat-trapping effects warm the Earth, much like a greenhouse traps heat to warm itself.

Other examples of greenhouse gases are methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor, and hydrofluorocarbons (AKA, refrigerants). This is why, in Newton Foote’s experiment, it makes sense that air humidity trapped the second highest amount of heat: water vapor is a greenhouse gas, too (just not as strong of one)!

It’s important to note that, without the greenhouse gas effect, the Earth would be about 0 degrees Fahrenheit—roughly 60 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the current average global temperature. No thanks.

Greenhouse gases actually enable a lot of life-sustaining processes, like photosynthesis and the water cycle. This is why we see some articles that frame the increasing levels of greenhouse gases that are causing climate change as a good thing. So, while it’s not inaccurate to point out the positives of greenhouse gases, it’s also not the whole story.

As with anything, too much of a good thing is a bad thing. And we’ve really swung too far in the ‘bad’ direction.

A summary of how the greenhouse gas effect has altered the Earth’s climate since the work of Newton Foote, Tyndall, and Arrhenius (and others!) in a few short paragraphs is daunting to both write and understand. So, if you leave this issue with more questions than answers, that’s good.

For now, here’s a glimpse of what Mother Nature’s been up to more recently:

This graph—infamously called the “hockey stick graph”—comes from research published in 1999 by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Michael Hughes. It remains today as one of the most foundational explanations of what’s happening to the modern climate, although it was contested by the scientific community for nearly ten years before it was ultimately accepted.

The hockey stick graph was created by analyzing historic temperatures collected from tree rings and ice cores, both of which are very common methods for reconstructing the ancient climate. The result shows a sharp increase in average global surface temperatures since the start of the 1900s. The first part of the graph’s time series makes up the handle of the hockey stick, and the sharp increase in global temperature resembles the hockey stick’s blade.

An updated version of the hockey stick graph that includes more recent temperatures (up to 2016) looks like this:

Same shape, same trends. In fact:

You might be wondering… I’ve heard the Earth has been hotter before, though. Why is it concerning that global temperatures are rising if the Earth has experienced this before?

The short answer: The global average temperatures we are reaching are not the hottest the Earth has ever experienced, but they are the hottest that humans have ever experienced. And we’re experiencing them at an alarmingly unprecedented rate at which natural systems cannot adapt sustainably, triggering things like biodiversity loss, glacial melt, and ecosystem collapse.

Hotter temperatures also make weather patterns more volatile- storms get more frequent and severe. At best, this means your insurance premiums go up and it’s harder to find fresh produce that wasn’t wiped out by a storm. At worst, this means natural disaster recovery costs skyrocket (they’re already nearly 7x higher than they were in the 1980s) as well as the number of people vulnerable to experiencing them. (Between 2010 and 2020, human deaths from floods, droughts and storms were 15x higher in highly vulnerable regions.)

You might be wondering… A global temperature increase of 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the span of 150ish years sounds pretty trivial. Is it really that big of a deal?

The short answer: Yes, although your confusion makes sense. A global temperature 64.4 degree Fahrenheit day compared to a 62 degree Fahrenheit day isn’t something you’ll need to dress differently for- you likely wouldn’t even realize that it’s slightly warmer. But we cannot equate how regional temperature change feels to what global temperature change means.

Earth is like a giant thermal sponge. 🧽 By the time we reached a one-degree increase in temperature, the Earth already absorbed a ton more heat, particularly by the oceans. And warmer temperatures make Earth’s systems more volatile- the ocean takes up more warmth, which causes sea level rise; atmospheric patterns get all wonky, instigating nastier storms and natural disasters; and instances of extreme heat and drought increase.

You might be wondering… But how do we know humans are to blame, especially since the Earth has gone through warming periods before? Couldn’t climate change be natural?

The short answer: We did in fact do this, unfortunately. There’s no getting out of this one. Here’s why:

With the end of the year quickly approaching, it’s only right that we give a year-in-review on the climate.

Next week, we’ll summarize all that’s happened in 2025 for the climate: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Have a specific topic on climate science you want to learn about?

You're not a climate denier, but you're not the Lorax, either. You recycle when you can, and you're at least mildly concerned when you see news headlines about extreme weather events that you don't remember happening even a few decades ago. You want to learn more about the climate, but not enough to want to spend large chunks of time reading and sifting through news posts and research articles.

Does this describe you? If so, welcome aboard.

Climatific strips the politics from climate change to provide brief weekly lessons on what the Earth’s climate is, how it works, and why it matters. It saves you time, energy, and resources by sending a TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) on climate science right to your inbox on Tuesday mornings.

Climatific calls on climate science, not the news, to help you better navigate the conversations around you.

No buzzwords, just science.

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