Who the heck started all this global warming fuss anyway?

I think we can give the credit — or blame — to Svante Arrhenius. He was a Swedish chemist, a Nobel prize-winner, a pretty smart guy. In 1896 he concluded that changing the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere could alter, and in fact had altered, the temperature of planet Earth [On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground, Philosophical Magazine 1896(41): 237-76]. He wasn’t the first to theorize that altering the amount of CO2 and other atmospheric gases could change global temperature, but he was the first to suggest that it had actually happened — it might even have caused the ice ages.