The news article that predicted the devastating impact of fossil fuels on climate change and warned the damage will be ‘considerable in a few centuries’ – in 1912!
- The article appeared in Rodney and Otamatea Times more than 100 years ago
- The unknown author says the burning of coal is creating a ‘blanket’ for the Earth
- The ‘greenhouse’ effect was officially first discovered in 1824 by Joseph Fourier
A tiny clipping from a New Zealand newspaper more than 100 years ago predicts the effects of global warming ‘may be considerable in a few centuries’.
The author links the burning of coal and warming of the atmosphere – describing it as a ‘blanket’ for the Earth.
The snippet is only ten lines long and was probably just a ‘filler’ for a newspaper – but it suggests people understood the effects of burning coal earlier than thought.
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The four-sentence article (pictured) was sandwiched between an article on a skipping machine and another about a Russian tunnel that would connect the Black and Caspian Seas
The clipping from 14 August 1912 was published in the Rodney and Otamatea Times and found online at the National Library of New Zealand.
The four-sentence article was sandwiched between an article on a skipping machine and another about a proposed Russian tunnel that would connect the Black and Caspian Sea.
The piece had also appeared in Australian newspapers – on 10 July 1912 in the Shoalhaven Telegraph and then in the Brainwood Dispatch on 17 July of the same year.
‘The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year’, the unknown journalist wrote.
‘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’, he said.
The article finished with the prophetic line; ‘The effect may be considerable in a few centuries’.
The finding suggests people knew about global warming and the impacts of burning coal earlier than originally thought.
And its predictions appear to be coming true.
Today, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere are at their highest for at least the last 800,000 years.
Fourteen of the sixteen warmest years on record have occurred since 2000, with 2015 confirmed as the warmest year globally on record.
‘Such a run of high temperatures is extremely unlikely to have occurred in the absence of human-caused climate change,’ it says.
The author links the burning of coal and warming of the atmosphere – describing it as a ‘blanket’ for the Earth
The ‘greenhouse’ effect was officially first discovered in 1824 by a French mathematician and physicist, Joseph Fourier.
He calculated that if take into account the size of the sun and Earth and the distance between them then the earth should be far cooler than it actually is.
This lead him to believe there was some sort of blanket mechanism which was keeping the Earth warm.
That figure is now known to be around 33°C colder than it would be otherwise.
In 1859 John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, shows the greenhouse effect is created by the accumulation of gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapour.
‘We’ve known about CO2 and warming for about as long as we’ve known about evolution, or continental drift, or the age of the Earth,’ said Dr Cameron Muir at the Research centre for the National Museum of Australia in Canberra told Stuff.co.nz.
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