With our TV screens full of forest fires and the devastation caused across the UK and Europe, even hardened climate sceptics are starting to wonder if there isn’t some small grain of truth in the idea that a lot of our problems are man-made.
If only people had warned us!
Well, forget the warnings that started in the late 1960’s when environmental bodies such as Friends of the Earth were founded.
Or the "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" document from 1992 (signed by around 1,700 leading scientists).
Or the 2006 film ‘An inconvenient truth’ by USA ex-Vice President Al Gore.
Or his sequel in 2017 – titled: ‘An inconvenient sequel – Truth to power’.
What if I told you that we have been warned
… and warned
… and warned
… well over a century ago!
The 1912 article says that ‘the effect may be considerable in a few centuries’
Russell Jones Content and communications manager
Coal Consumption Affecting Climate
A short report in a small newspaper from New Zealand has recently re-emerged, which was published in 1912 on August 14th.
The Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette published the following article:
Coal consumption affecting climate
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
The article was first noticed and reported on the ‘Science Alert’ website in 2018 describing the brief note as warning “the Earth’s atmosphere was changing because of the way the world economies were ramping up the production of fossil fuels.
Fact checking
USA Today also reported the article in 2021
After fact checking whether the article was real, it concluded that the piece had first been published in a March 1912 report in a magazine called Popular Mechanics and then republished in several other newspapers later that year, including the New Zealand piece mentioned above.
The Popular Mechanics report is titled, “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate – What Scientists Predict for the Future.”
It goes into much more detail than the short entry in the Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette article.
An even older warning!
However, there may be an even earlier warning from April 1896 in the fifth series of the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, which published extensive writings under the title: “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground”.
In his introduction to the 39-page article on geological climatology the author, Professor Svante Arrhenius says: “A great deal has been written on the influence of the absorption of the atmosphere upon the climate.”
He goes on to look at ‘another side of the question, one that has long attracted the attention of physicists’: “Is the mean temperature of the ground in any way influenced by the presence of heat-absorbing gases in the atmosphere?”
The article looks in great depth at the mathematics behind the collection of both water vapour and carbonic acid in the atmosphere and its likely impact on ground temperatures, pointing to the amount of coal being burnt in the industrial nations.
In conclusion, the paper quotes the author as stating: “I should certainly not have undertaken these tedious calculations if an extraordinary interest had not been connected with them”.
He then discusses lively discussions that took place in the Physical Society of Stockholm on the probable causes of the Ice Age, and the conclusion that there is (at the time) no satisfactory hypothesis that explains how the climactic conditions for an ice age could be realised in such a short period.
The author then goes on to speculate how much carbonic acid must vary to alter global temperatures.
Whilst this complex and detailed paper from 1896 makes no direct correlation with climate change, it should perhaps serve as the earliest warning that man’s activities had the potential to significantly alter the earth’s temperature.
So, look around you as we see more and more extreme weather events and tell me why you still don't think this is man made?
And no, we can’t ever say we weren’t warned!
Russell Jones is content and communications manager
