“A glacier is one of those great implements of nature which is always impressive,” Russell Owen wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1937. His piece examined glaciers in Alaska, Asia and Antarctica when there was far less information about the environmental effect of climate change.
“What causes glaciers to retreat and advance, what long-time changes in climate influence them, science does not know,” Mr. Owen wrote at the time.
F. A. Silcox, the chief forester at the United States Department of Agriculture, wrote in The Times that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed an order putting $15 million toward drought relief through “the planting of forest strips in the plains region.”
Mr. Silcox said the effort would be “the largest project ever undertaken in this country to modify climatic and other agricultural conditions in an area that is now constantly harassed by winds and drought.”
Using tree-ring intervals from juniper logs found in a tomb in Turkey in 1962, scientists established an 804-year chronology of climate change for the pre-Christian era.
As a group of 178 nations in 2001 rescued the Kyoto Protocol, compromising to finish a treaty that for the first time would formally require industrialized countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the Bush administration was on the sidelines, Andrew C. Revkin of The Times wrote.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said in Rome, where the president met with the pope, “I don’t believe that it is a surprise to anyone that the United States believes that this particular protocol is not in its interests, nor do we believe that it really addresses the problem of global climate change.”
A prolonged fight between nations small and large over a climate pact came to a somewhat uncertain end in Copenhagen in 2009.
The chairman of the climate treaty talks declared that the parties would “take note” of the Copenhagen Accord, Andrew C. Revkin and John M. Broder of The Times wrote. This left open the question of whether the effort to curb greenhouse gases from the world’s major emitters would gain the full support of the 193 countries bound by the original 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The article cited a report by Charles Lathrop Pack of the American Forestry Association, pointing to decreased rainfall, especially in summer, a decrease in relative humidity, an increase in wind and severe frost.
Bad weather and “the threat of more of it” cast a pall over outlooks on the global food situation in 1974. As Harold M. Schmeck Jr. wrote in The New York Times: “It is a threat the world may have to face more often in the years ahead.”
At the Earth Summit in 1992, there was already a fading sense of optimism about the world’s environment.
As the representatives of 178 countries gathered in Rio de Janeiro, they were forced to confront a far more sobering task than had their predecessors, who gathered in Stockholm 20 years before to put the cause of the environment on the world’s formal agenda for the first time.
In what William K. Stevens of The New York Times called “those palmy save-the-whales years, full of hope and idealism,” the delegates to the United Nations Environment Conference in Sweden had asserted confidently that “the capability of man to improve the environment increases with each passing day.”
Twenty years later, the optimism of 1972 was replaced by hard realism, with the delegates discovering how difficult it was for nations to unite on addressing fundamental environmental problems.
A theory that had been dismissed as inadequate was re-examined in 1956: Rising levels of carbon dioxide could be responsible for a warmer climate.
“According to a theory which was held half a century ago, variation in the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide can account for climatic change,” Waldemar Kaempffert wrote in The Times on Oct. 28, 1956. “The theory was generally dismissed as inadequate.”
According to Dr. Gilbert Plass, “the carbon dioxide theory stands up, though it may take another century of observation and measurement of temperature to confirm it.”
There was one small problem with the first treaty addressing global warming, in which 193 countries pledged to avoid “dangerous” human interference with the climate: There was no accepted definition of “dangerous.”
But even then, targets and timetables were negotiated without a consensus on what would lead to climatic stability.
After a decade of cautious circling, some scientists and policy makers sought to agree on how much warming was too much.
Dennis A. Tirpak, a researcher who once worked for the Environmental Protection Agency, said at the time that experts always realized it would take a long time for science’s projections to be absorbed by society, but few thought it would take as long as it did.
“I’ve always been a believer that science and truth will win out in the end,” he said. “But I have a sense we might be running out of time.”
Trees and plants can be used for shade, insulation and blocking or redirecting wind to “alter and improve” conditions in “microclimates,” according to a 1967 article in The New York Times.
“Plants can help control climates, at least on a small scale,” Gary Robinette wrote in The Times on Sept. 10, 1967. “They possess qualities which enable them to alter and improve precise climates within limited areas.”
The article included diagrams showing how planting trees in strategic spots near homes could help create more friendly microclimates for residents.
Dr. James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist and leading expert on climate change, told Congress in 1988 that he was “99 percent certain” that human-induced global warming was real.
This week, Dr. Hansen, who retired in 2013, spoke on the sidelines of the Paris climate talks and criticized the negotiators’ efforts to reach a deal on emissions as “half-baked.”
“A glacier is one of those great implements of nature which is always impressive,” Russell Owen wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1937. His piece examined glaciers in Alaska, Asia and Antarctica when there was far less information about the environmental effect of climate change.
“What causes glaciers to retreat and advance, what long-time changes in climate influence them, science does not know,” Mr. Owen wrote at the time.
In 1901, the European edition of The New York Herald published the work of the scientist Leon Lewis, who predicted the break-up of the “so-called continent” of Antarctica. A glacial flood was sure to follow, he claimed, one that would wipe out the entire human race.
Specialists proposed keeping an eye on the environment at the first world climate conference in 1979. Faced with little-understood threats to the climate, The New York Times wrote, specialists were considering a “World Climate Program” to narrow the uncertainties.
In 1990, the United States was singled out as one of the world’s worst polluters.
The Times’s Marlise Simons, reporting from the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva, wrote that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain had criticized Washington, saying that a clear case already existed for taking immediate precautions on global warming. “The need for more research should not be an excuse for much needed action now,” she said.
European officials also complained that American energy prices were too low and provided no incentive for conservation.
As the negotiators at Le Bourget near Paris try to figure out how to pay for aid to poor nations, we look back to the 2009 talks in Copenhagen. No binding conclusions were reached there, but a precedent was set: It got money flowing.
According to comments in 1925 by the official forecaster of the United States Weather Bureau in New York, the world’s climate was not likely to change, ever.
A New York Times article in 1958 described the work of scientists whose “object has been to solve a fascinating riddle: What is happening to the world’s ice?”
“Such changes imply that the world is becoming warmer,“ Leonard Engel wrote. “But no one is sure of the extent of these changes. Moreover, brilliant new research suggests that the melting of the Arctic’s floating ice may have the paradoxical effect of bringing, in perhaps as little as several hundred years, the start of a new Ice Age.”
Correction: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this post misstated the year of the article. As the headline correctly stated, it was from 1958, not 1858.