In 1954, when people worried about climate change, it was about the possibility that glaciers might return.

Sure it might take thousands of years. But the idea that they would come back and swallow the planet was considered more likely than what actually happened.

The world would undergo periods of heating up and then periods of cooling. In 1982, Newsweek had a cover about our cooling planet.

Yeah, some scientists mentioned the idea that maybe sending so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere might do something to heat up the planet.

The idea that things were changing for the warmer didn’t become the operative scientific belief until the 1990s, when the term “greenhouse effect” became accepted.

It might have been hard for older people to grasp the idea that things were getting warmer. But if you’ve been around for 70 years, you’ve noticed a few things.

Winters aren’t as cold as they used to be – except when there’s a gap in the atmosphere and a polar vortex comes sweeping out of Canada with ridiculously low temperatures.

It’s also a lot drier. That’s a problem for vegetation – trees especially.  And that leads to wildfires that create scary skies like the ones in the United States last summer that were bright orange.

And storms are more violent. Sandy, the 2012 superstorm that destroyed a lot of the New York area, was seen as a harbinger of the kind of disaster the world has coming if nothing is done to curtail the changes in climate.

But while the rest of the world watched ice caps melt and sea levels rise and said, hey, I think these scientists have a point, the idea of climate change met with opposition in this country.

Because so much of the U.S. relies on fossil fuel production – think of the places dependent on oil and coal – the resistance partly comes from people worried that they won’t be able to make a living in a world powered by wind and sun. 

They’ve been goaded by cynical figures who, instead of leading, decided to challenge the science. Climate change was said to be a hoax – one idiot senator from Oklahoma brought a snowball to the floor to “prove” that climate change isn’t real.

One idiot president also used the word hoax – and who were his idiot followers going to believe – him or their lying eyes?

Trump pulled the United States out of the world’s most comprehensive agreement to combat climate change, the Paris Agreement signed by 195 nations in 2015. The agreement’s goal is to limit the increase in the world’s mean temperature to less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit – and preferably less than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. To achieve the goal, the world needs to cut emissions by 50% before the end of this decade.

Urgency about climate change has led to several changes in our life. More reliance on non-fossil fuels, such as solar and wind. Electric and hybrid vehicles, after being shunned as an idea for decades, are becoming the car industry’s dominant product. The idea that products or plane trips can be “carbon neutral” is being instilled in the public.

Will we succeed in stopping the planet from becoming too warm to live on? That’s not the kind of question people in 1954 would have expected to hear.