Until recently, humans did not significantly affect the much larger forces of climate and atmosphere. Many scientists believe, however, that with the dawn of the industrial age—and the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas, and oil—humans began to significantly add to the amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, enhancing the planet's natural greenhouse effect and causing higher temperatures.
Climate Change Threatens Society
"Climate change . . . is the single greatest threat that societies face today." —James Gustave Speth, environmentalist and dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
James Gustave Speth, "The Single Greatest Threat: The United States and Global Climate Disruption," Harvard International Review, Summer 2005.
The Industrial Revolution began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Great Britain when manual labor began to be replaced by machinery fueled by new sources of energy. The first sign of this change was mechanization of England's textile mills, the development of iron-making techniques, and the increasing use of coal rather than wood and water power for heating, industry, and transportation. Around 1850, steam power was invented as a way to use coal energy more efficiently, and soon steam engines were used to power trains, ships, and industrial machinery of all sorts. These inventions spread throughout Europe, the United States, and other regions, bringing enormous changes in society and commerce. Later in the nineteenth century, scientists learned how to generate electricity, and the discovery of oil led to the invention of the internal combustion engine, both technological developments that further changed the way humans lived and worked around the globe.
Around 1850, steam power was invented as a way to use coal energy more efficiently, bringing enormous changes in society and commerce. Here, a worker operates a steam engine in 1854.
By the end of the twentieth century, the world was completely dependent on and rapidly depleting the planet's fossil fuels— resources such as coal, natural gas, and oil that are formed from the decomposed remains of prehistoric plants and animals. As Hillman explains, "Fossil fuels contain the energy stored from the sun that took hundreds of thousands of years to accumulate, yet within the space of a few generations—a mere blink of the planet's life so far—we are burning it."
The result of this rapid burning of fossil resources, many scientists believe, is rising concentrations of greenhouse gases that may be overheating the planet. Scientists have determined, for example, that concentrations of carbon dioxide have been increasing
since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In 1750, there were 280 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but by 2005, the levels of carbon dioxide had risen to 380 ppm, an increase of over one-third. And much of this increase has occurred in recent years, since 1959, as world energy usage has expanded dramatically. The United States is responsible for almost a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and China is the second-largest emitter. Other countries with high emissions include members of the European Union, while the lowest emissions come from various nations in Africa.
The major source of human-produced greenhouse emissions— accounting for approximately 65 percent—is the use of fossil fuels to power industry, transportation, home heating, electricity generation, and cooking. However, carbon emissions are also increased when carbon-absorbing forests are cut down to make way for human developments and woodlands, grasslands, and prairies are converted into farmland for agriculture. As geography professor Michael Pidwirny explains, "Rural ecosystems can hold 20 to 100 times more carbon dioxide per unit area than agricultural systems."6 Together, these human activities are believed to account for at least 28 percent of the Earth's total greenhouse emissions, with the balance produced by natural sources.
The scientific study of Global warming
Scientists have long suspected a link between industrialization and global warming, but serious study of the issue did not begin until the second half of the twentieth century. In 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius was the first to suggest that the burning of fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide gas to the Earth's atmosphere and could raise the planet's average temperature. At the time and for decades thereafter, however, Arrhenius's discovery of the greenhouse effect was dismissed by the mainstream scientific community, which reasoned that such a major climate change would not likely be produced by humans and could only happen slowly over tens of thousands of years. Most scientists at the time also believed that the vast oceans would absorb most of the carbon dioxide produced by industry.
By the 1950s and 1960s, however, improved instruments for measuring long-wave radiation allowed scientists to prove that Arrhenius's theory was correct. At that time, studies also confirmed that carbon dioxide levels were indeed rising year after year. In 1958, Charles D. Keeling, a scientist with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, conducted the first reliable measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory and found concentrations of the gas to be 315 ppm and growing.
Charles D. Keeling, a scientist with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, receives the National Medal of Science from President George W. Bush on June 12, 2002. Keeling took the first reliable measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide and confirmed that carbon dioxide levels were rising every year.
Charles D. Keeling, a scientist with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, receives the National Medal of Science from President George W. Bush on June 12, 2002. Keeling took the first reliable measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide and confirmed that carbon dioxide levels were rising every year.
Continue reading here: Climate Change May Be Natural
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Technology has changed the world in many ways, but perhaps no period introduced more changes than the Second Industrial Revolution. From the late 19th to early 20th centuries, cities grew, factories sprawled and people’s lives became regulated by the clock rather than the sun.
“It was a tremendous transformation of people’s lives,” says Joshua B. Freeman professor of history at Queens College and author of Behemoth: The Making of the Factory and the Modern World.
Rapid advances in the creation of steel, chemicals and electricity helped fuel production, including mass-produced consumer goods and weapons. It became far easier to get around on trains, automobiles and bicycles. At the same time, ideas and news spread via newspapers, the radio and telegraph. Life got a whole lot faster.
Factory Jobs Were Grueling
It was an era when industrial growth created a class of wealthy entrepreneurs and a comfortable middle class supported by workers who were made up by immigrants and arrivals from America’s farms and small towns.
“People are coming from rural backgrounds who are used to self-directing their work, which is organized around the seasons and light,” Freeman says. “Now they are working in a factory that is clock-regulated and unchanging.”
For many, the shift from rural to factory life was grueling—especially for children.
When social activist Jane Addams threw a Christmas party at the group home she had just founded in Chicago’s slums in 1889, she passed out candy to the impoverished girls who lived there. She was surprised when they refused. The girls said they worked long hours in a candy factory and couldn’t stand the sight or smell of it.
“We discovered that for six weeks they had worked from seven in the morning until nine at night,” Addams later wrote, “and they were exhausted as well as satiated. The sharp consciousness of stern economic conditions was thus thrust upon us in the midst of the season of good will.”
Factory Products Remade Life in America
The first factories were built in the 18th century, with British textile mills that spread to the United States, a time known as the First Industrial Revolution. Then innovations in production line technology, materials science and industrial toolmaking made it easier to mass produce all kinds of goods that remade the American family and physical landscape.
Factories produced sewing machines for home use, steel girders for skyscrapers and railroad tracks that cut through the plains and mountains.
Long-distance transportation networks connected by rail, steamship and canals opened new markets for farmers, factory owners and bankers who could bring America’s natural resources to a global marketplace. For the first time, goods from the American heartland could be shipped long distances, eliminating the need for local bartering systems.
Black Diamond Express train on the Lehigh Valley Railroad in Pennsylvania, circa 1898.
Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images
Railroad Expansion Alters the U.S. Landscape
Railroads were largely responsible for this great burst of economic production, according to Richard White, a Stanford history professor and author of Railroaded (2001). The iron chariots also changed the human and natural environment of the West, and of course led to conflicts with Native Americans who had lived there for generations.
“If a Western Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1869 and awakened in 1896, he would not have recognized the lands that the railroads had touched,” White writes. “Bison had yielded to cattle; mountains had been blasted and bored. Great swaths of land that had once whispered grass now screamed corn and wheat."
Railroad lines expanded from 35,000 miles in 1865 to 254,000 miles in 1916. Yet after World War I, the railroad would be replaced by the automobile. With his emphasis on vertical integration of parts and assembly line manufacturing, Henry Ford was its king. At its peak, the Ford Motor Company factory in Michigan employed 40,000 workers under one big roof.
READ MORE: The Cars That Made America
While some historians quibble over the exact boundary between the First Industrial Revolution, that began in the mid-18th century, and the second, that started around the mid-19th century, a primary difference is that the second saw the beginning of mass production in manufacturing and consumer goods.
Cotton mill workers from Indianapolis, circa 1908.
Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images
Household Goods No Longer Homemade
Household items like soap, butter and clothing that used to be made at home started being made in factories as well. And factory workers—including women—then had the money to buy these products.
At the same time, all kinds of goods became standardized for the first time, according to Priya Satia, professor of international history at Stanford University. For example, industrial standardization marked an evolution in the arms industry, says Satia, author of Empire of Guns: The Making of the Industrial Revolution.
“You could produce all the parts of a gun and assemble any set and make a gun,” Satia says. “The advantage is if you are out in the field and something goes wrong, someone can send you that part and fix it without having to redo the entire gun.”
READ MORE: The History of Firearms in the U.S.
The changing world of the Second Industrial Revolution also led to fears by social critics about the loss of freedom, autonomy and independence that is replaced by boredom, repetition and toil, according to Freeman. Early 20th-century films like Fritz Lang’s sci-fi dystopia “Metropolis” or Charlie Chaplin’s assembly line comedy “Modern Times” capture this fear of the factory worker as a human robot.
“Ford is a great hero,” Freeman says, “but the other side of the coin is a nightmarish vision of the factory as Satan’s province.”
The Second Industrial Revolution ended just before World War I, historians say. It has been followed by the Third Industrial Revolution in which digital communications technology and the internet changed how we transmit information, do business and interact with each other.
Some argue we are now entering a Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and biotechnology are changing our concepts of both life and consciousness. The trajectory of this phase of human development must wait for future historians to write.