Eight catastrophic floods in 11 days: What's behind intense rainfall around the world?

"Scientists say climate change is likely having an impact on rainfall and flooding, but understanding precisely what that relationship is can be tricky."

But the road to understanding climate change stretches back to the tweed-clad middle years of the 19th century—when Victorian-era scientists conducted the first experiments proving that runaway CO2 could, one day, cook the planet.

In other words, “global warming was officially discovered more than 100 years ago.”

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Early climate research grew out of the astonishing ferment of science in that century. Scientists were formulating the basis of our modern understanding of thermodynamics, and its connection to chemistry and molecular physics. One was Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician and physicist who spent his career pondering the mechanics and equations governing heat transfer. He was intrigued by a puzzle: Why was the Earth as warm as it was? When he estimated how much energy from the sun hit our planet, he figured the Earth ought to be colder than it is.

The answer, he proposed, must be the atmosphere: It was somehow preventing heat from escaping. In an 1824 paper, he hypothesized that gases in the atmosphere must create barriers that acted to trap heat. Fourier didn’t yet know what molecular mechanisms were trapping the heat. But in an 1837 paper for The American Journal of Science and Arts, he surmised that over a long period of time, the amount of heat held in by the atmosphere could change — altered by both the Earth’s natural evolution and human activity. “The establishment and progress of human society, and the action of natural powers, may, in extensive regions, produce remarkable changes in the state of the surface, the distribution of the waters, and the great movements of the air,” he predicted. “Such effects, in the course of some centuries, must produce variations in the mean temperature for such places.”