USA Unify & Progressive Power Journalism Scientists understood the cause of climate change more than a century ago. By 1912, newspapers were already warning that burning coal released carbon dioxide that trapped heat in the atmosphere. This insight built on decades of earlier work showing how greenhouse gases warm the planet. Understanding the history matters because it shows that the science has been clear for a long time. What has changed is the scale of fossil fuel use and the amount of CO₂ we have added to the atmosphere, not the underlying physics.
