Almost 170 years ago, scientist Eunice Foote discovered a fundamental truth about the gases that surround us. In her home laboratory in New York City, she filled one glass cylinder with carbon dioxide and the other with regular oxygen. air, placed a thermometer in each, and left them in the sun. In less than 20 minutes, the cylinder filled with carbon dioxide was much hotter—and much harder to cool—than the other. Foote concluded that carbon dioxide traps heat and theorized that “an atmosphere of this gas would give our Earth a high temperature.” These early experiments were a prelude to what has become the most monumental—and frustrating—scientific endeavor in history: understanding, characterizing, and modeling the Earth’s climate system. Today, more than ever, we face worrying consequences of this knowledge.

Climate science has become the most important scientific collaboration in history, a vast human achievement that includes geologists, physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, biologists, meteorologists, and archaeologists. Creating an accurate model of Earth's climate requires a huge amount of data, and the photographs reveal the extreme efforts that scientists are making to measure gases, ice, clouds, and other elements. These efforts have revealed amazing, surprising, and scary thingsThey show us that we live in a rare period of mild, stable climate from which human civilization emerged. This window fostered human creativity, ingenuity, and industry, all of which now power the unprecedentedly rapid change Earth's atmosphere and everything it supports.

All of this was not easy. Climate scientists faced not only extreme working conditions, but also antagonistic political movements, which reject their findings and try to stop their work altogether. Yet their desire to understand the planet compels them to put on snowsuits, diving suits, and office suits. It motivates them to climb to the top of high observatories or live for months on a piece of floating ice.

Evidence of change is being collected around the world and is as a result of inhuman efforts. In the remote Amazon rainforest, atop the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory, scientists climb more than 1,500 steps to take continuous measurements of aerosols and greenhouse gases. Chemist Jürgen Kesselmeier describes the feeling of losing contact with the surface below as “not fear, but respect.” In Antarctica, where scientists drill into ancient ice to learn about climates millions of years ago, the work is exciting but also demanding, putting personal life on hold. These ice cores, including a 1.2-million-year-old core, reveal how rapid climate change has occurred in the past for natural reasons, which could help improve models that predict human-caused climate change.

On the ocean, during Orchestra's two-month campaign in the tropical Atlantic, research vessels collect cloud data while surrounded by satellites and drones that also monitor the situation. The ICOS system, a vast network of almost 180 measuring stations in 16 European countries, continuously collects greenhouse gas data in remote areas such as the Arctic tundra or at sea.

Experiments like the “mountain-moving” experiment, where tons of soil and vegetation are transplanted to lower altitudes in the French Alps, show that communities respond in unexpected ways. Plants and fungi adapt to new environments at different speeds, suggesting potentially problematic asynchrony, which could disrupt ecological communities.

The measured data is processed by supercomputers such as Jupiter, capable of trillions of calculations per second, allowing high-resolution simulations, which will reveal the local impacts of climate change – the things that “really matter to people.” Satellites have been continuously monitoring the Earth since 1969, recording changes in forests, oceans, deserts, ice, gases and sea levels.

The longest continuous measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been underway at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii since 1958. These measurements have resulted in the famous Keeling curve, which shows constant increase in carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activity. However, even this key research effort, which has gathered the most important evidence of carbon dioxide-driven climate change, is under threat from efforts to dismantle it.

In the extreme conditions of the Arctic, which is warming faster than any other region on Earth, nearly 100 people drifted on an ice floe for nearly a year during the MOSAiC expedition. They braved subzero temperatures, polar night, freezing eyelashes, and ever-changing ice to update models of the Arctic. Their “little city of MOSAiC” on the ice was constantly in motion, with ice dynamics constantly changing locations and destroying instruments.

Although “through the fog of doom that shrouds climate science, there is a passion for understanding and solving one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced,” the findings are clear. We live in a time unprecedented changeswhich are the result of our own actionsClimate science provides us with the tools we need to understand and mitigate these changes, but its fate and the fate of our planet depend on whether we listen and act. Ignoring this knowledge would be truly disastrous. JRi

The article was originally published on quantamagazine.org