The Climate Change Debate: The History and The Forefathers

Typography
To many of us it seems as though the climate change debate is only a recent phenomena, and indeed, we have been positively bombarded by the media coverage of global warming in the past decade. Surprisingly, though, climate change speculation and study have been taking place for quite some time. In his recently published article in Weatherwise, a non-profit weather magazine, professor of geological sciences and contributing editor Randy Cerveny points out that some unexpected characters were just as concerned with weather change as we are now. Any self- respecting history buff might guess that the foremost of our founding fathers to study climate change would have been Benjamin Franklin. It all adds up—he discovered electricity, invented bifocals, and constructed the first lightning rod. However, although Franklin was an outspoken student of weather and nature, Cerveny classifies none other than Noah Webster, lexicographer and founder of the modern Merriam- Webster Dictionary, as “one of the most strident investigators on the subject of early American climate change.”

To many of us it seems as though the climate change debate is only a recent phenomena, and indeed, we have been positively bombarded by the media coverage of global warming in the past decade. Surprisingly, though, climate change speculation and study have been taking place for quite some time. In his recently published article in Weatherwise, a non-profit weather magazine, professor of geological sciences and contributing editor Randy Cerveny points out that some unexpected characters were just as concerned with weather change as we are now.

Any self- respecting history buff might guess that the foremost of our founding fathers to study climate change would have been Benjamin Franklin. It all adds up—he discovered electricity, invented bifocals, and constructed the first lightning rod. However, although Franklin was an outspoken student of weather and nature, Cerveny classifies none other than Noah Webster, lexicographer and founder of the modern Merriam- Webster Dictionary, as "one of the most strident investigators on the subject of early American climate change."

In his intriguing Noah Webster: Lexicographer, Climatologist, Professor Cerveny points out the low and high points of Webster’s career studying climate change. The lexicographer had many rivals in the scientific field, among whom were Thomas Jefferson and Harvard professor Samuel Williams, who hypothesized that local weather patterns changed with the colonization of American settlements as forest was cut down and converted to fields used for crop production. Webster built on this concept when he noted that "the clearing of lands opens them to the sun, their moisture is exhaled, they are more heated in summer, but more cold in winter near the surface; the temperature becomes unsteady, and the seasons irregular." Among his successes in climate change study also include his prediction that orbital changes of the earth alter long- term climate, a theory he anticipated, notes Cerveny, almost 200 years before it became known as fact.

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