Editorial and cover:Fifty years after the first artificial satellite: from Sputnik 1 to ENVISAT

摘要

Almost a century after Tyndall's discovery in 1859 that changes in the concentration of the atmospheric gases could bring about climate change, and almost 50 years after Arrhenius' calculation in 1896 of the global wanning from human emissions of CO_2, a small group of scientists got together to push international cooperation to a higher level in all areas of geophysics. They aimed to coordinate their data gathering and to persuade their governments to spend extra money on research. The result was the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957-1958.