PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE MANAGING WATER RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT IN A CHANGING CLIMATE

摘要

Many people seem to believe that anthropogenic climate change is a new phenomenon that has been freshly discovered, or possibly recently and covertly hatched in the back room of some environmental organization. However, in the late 1890s, Svante Arrhenius, predicted that increased carbon dioxide being released to the atmosphere, primarily due to burning coal, would increase the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and T.C. Chamberlin developed a model demonstrating the global carbon cycle, including feedback mechanisms. In the 1930s through the mid 1960s Chamberlain, Charles Keeling, and others again raised the issue of the potential impacts of human activities on the Earth's climate, but their message largely fell on deaf ears. It wasn't until the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time of increasing environmental awareness, that numerous scientific organizations began to openly discuss and rigorously debate human impacts on the climate.