| Summary/Abstract |
Over the decades, climate change has emerged as an established wisdom of contemporary times. This has happened merely in the span of last three decades. Prior history of the science of climate change was full with controversy and debate. When at the turn of the nineteenth century the Swedish chemist Svante Arhenius (1896) proposed this hypothesis for the first time that man-induced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of earth would lead to an increase in surface temperature through the greenhouse effect, not many took him seriously. To believe that the climate of earth was changing at a pace and scale far greater than the routine characteristic change forming part of the geological history of earth was too farfetched a contention at that time. For about next half a century as a result of some evidence it came generally to be agreed upon that some sort of climate change was happening but it still remained largely unclear whether this change had been happening in the direction of global cooling or that of global warming.
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