# Like who came up with the initial idea/ theory and when was it first proven?
In: Planetary Science
I mean, Google answers a lot of the basic facts in half a second.
The longer story is that we’ve known the Earth’s climate changes for a couple of hundred years. There was a miniature Ice Age from around 1400-1850 by the 1800’s scientists had figured out something was up – global societies had been very obviously altered, a quick example is that China suffered really badly from crop failures during this time which lead to a lot of Chinese interaction with the new “Global economy” for things like New World precious metals and cold tolerant crops (yams very specifically).
Anywho, so my 1850’s European scientists had evidence that the climate changes and then they started observing the effects of global warming as we left that mini-ice age. Glaciers melted and wildernesses were changing in real time and they observed first how glaciation affects the land – carving up mountains, dropping rocks and boulders, etc.
They took those observations and just looked around and realized there was evidence of that, x1,000,000 everywhere they looked. This combined with the knowledge that many animals had gone extinct ‘fairly recently’, things like Mammoths and Irish Elk and European Lions, etc.
So by the mid-1800’s we had solid theories that something “really bad, and really icy” specifically happened during human existence. Our knowledge of geology, the climate, the atmosphere, chemistry, and astronomy have all just refined and polished this theory over time.
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