Is the Earth drying up?
Résumé
Geographers begun to probe new theories on climate change at the turn of the 20th century. In this paper I will explain how the concept of global warming was discussed and proofs of global warming examined well before the early 1960s - this would be the date given by Weart for the discovery of global warming, when an American astrophysicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder noticed that the sky in the Rocky Mountains was no longer as bright as it used to be. Cartography has played a more crucial role in the discovery of global warming than atmospheric chemistry has. I can present here only one example of the significance of cartography: the survey of the western half of China (the two Mongolias, Inner and Outer, the provinces of Gansu and Ningxia, Eastern Turkestan or Xinjiang, and Tibet) that accompanied debates held in London on the desiccation of the Earth.