University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

The scientific understanding of climate change has been nearly 200 years in the making. Among the many 19th and early 20th Century scientists who contributed to our modern understanding of climate and atmospheric systems, Svante Arrhenius is noted for being one of the earliest to understand and articulate the greenhouse effect. Working at the end of the 19th Century, he noted how accumulations of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels would increase Earth's surface temperature. Arrhenius later published these ideas for a general audience in his 1906 work, Världarnas utveckling, which translates in English to "Worlds in the Making." My own work as an archivist is considerably influenced by and attentive to the issues presented by climate change. Climate change is arguably the defining global challenge of our time and will have dramatic effects on future generations, who will likely probe the historical record we are creating now in order to understand their circumstances. What future researchers will ultimately find in our collections depends in part on the selection and preservation decisions made by archivist and librarians working today. In selecting this volume to add to the Penn State Special Collections Library, I hope to convey to future researchers a small portion of the long-held, basic scientific principles behind anthropogenic climate change.