In high school, science was my personal nightmare. I hated it, and I was terrible at it.

But in the spirit of inquiry, I attended a March lecture at Wilder House called “Why Didn’t Climate Change Come Earlier?” The discussion turned out to be more history than science, but in the end that wasn’t reassurance enough.

Sverker Sorlin, an environmental-history professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, talked about early 20th-century rivalries in the race to the North Pole and posters from the 1950s that announced that the Arctic “was the new global hot spot!” He discussed the effect that Cold War politics had on the study of climate and environmental science. Both the Soviet and American militaries thought the Arctic might become one of the new frontiers of the conflict, which led to a rush to understand the region from a scientific perspective. In the process, the dangers of climate change became more evident and threatening.

It was less than heartening to learn that the only reason we did not wake up to climate change earlier was because everyone ignored the Swedish glaciologist who discovered it. Hans Ahlmann discovered as early as the 1930s that humans could affect the climate of an entire age—and that it was possible for the planet to heat up as a result of man’s interference. However, Ahlmann’s thesis was not really noted until Swedish American meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby, who taught at UChicago from 1940 to 1954, acknowledged his work in the 1940s. As Sorlin joked, “Everyone thinks we [glaciologists] are just innocent people studying glaciers, but, really, we are on to something bigger.”