Understanding the journey of climate science is crucial for teaching about both scientific methodology and our current climate crisis. The development of climate science over the past 150 plus years demonstrates how scientific knowledge builds step by step, with each discovery strengthening our understanding of Earth's systems.

What makes climate science particularly fascinating is how researchers using vastly different methods - from Victorian-era glass jars to modern satellites - have repeatedly confirmed the same fundamental conclusion: human-produced CO₂ drives climate change. This repeated confirmation through different approaches and time periods makes the evidence particularly powerful.

The story begins with Eunice Foote's groundbreaking 1856 experiments demonstrating CO₂'s heat-trapping properties. Despite her work being overlooked due to gender discrimination, her findings were independently confirmed three years later by John Tyndall's more detailed investigations. This early research laid the groundwork for Svante Arrhenius's 1896 breakthrough: the first prediction that doubling atmospheric CO₂ would significantly raise global temperatures.

As industrialisation accelerated, scientists developed increasingly sophisticated methods to study climate change. Guy Callendar's 1938 analysis of global weather station data provided the first clear evidence of warming trends linked to industrial emissions. The mid-20th century brought major advances: Gilbert Plass's pioneering use of early computers for climate modelling, Charles David Keeling's precise atmospheric CO2 measurements creating the famous "Keeling Curve," and the launch of comprehensive satellite monitoring programmes.

This growing body of evidence led to increasing scientific agreement and calls for action. James Hansen's 1988 Congressional testimony marked a crucial moment in communicating climate science to policymakers, while the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established a global framework for assessing and responding to climate change. By 1999, Antarctic ice core studies had provided evidence spanning 420,000 years, confirming the relationship between CO₂ and global temperature while highlighting how modern CO₂ levels far exceed anything seen in this long record.

When examining this history alongside modern temperature data visualisations like the climate stripes - where each stripe represents a year's average temperature relative to the 1961-2010 baseline - we see how these scientific predictions have proved accurate. The shift from predominantly blue stripes (indicating cooler years) to the stark red bands of recent decades (showing warming) provides clear visual proof of the warming trends these scientists identified and warned about.