Author: Scotty Hendricks / Source: Big Think
- An article from 1912 is making headlines for its mention of climate change by means of putting carbon into the atmosphere.
- It is but one of many articles and papers that mentioned human-driven climate change during the early 20th century.
- It reminds us that just because we can see a problem coming doesn’t mean we fully understand how quickly it will arrive or how dangerous it will be.
Somehow, there is still a public debate on whether climate change is occurring and how much of it humanity is responsable for. This is despite the agreement of 97% of climate scientists on the matter and decades of research. It gets even stranger when you realize that the idea that humans can change the environment is older than gasoline-powered cars and that people were discussing the potential effects of climate change before the Titanic sank.
Extra, Extra! Read all about it!
In the March 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics, an article on the balmy year of 1911 and the ability of humans to change the climate includes a single line that has shocked some modern readers. The caption for a photograph of a coal plant explains that:
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 raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
The article goes on to somewhat contradict its own caption, explaining how it is “highly improbable” that there would be enough change in the atmosphere within the next thousand years to have any noticeable effect on global temperatures, though it does argue that the Earth will get warmer before it gets cooler.
Oh, 1912, how innocent you were.
How did they know about climate change way back then?
The Popular Mechanics article was hardly ahead of its time. An article in Nature published in 1882 concluded that increased pollution “will have a marked influence on the climate of the world.” This article was widely discussed, and follow-ups to it are credited with popularizing discussion about the effects of pollution on the environment.
A basic understanding of the greenhouse effect goes back to 1824 when Joseph Fourier argued that Earth’s atmosphere allowed the planet to be warmer than it would be without one. He even speculated on the potential for humans to alter the climate, though he thought altering the land was more important to the process than changing the composition of the atmosphere. You can see in this quote how he also thought the process would take much longer to notice than it has:
The establishment and progress of human societies, the action of natural forces, can notably change, and in vast regions, the state of the surface, the distribution of water and the great movements of the air. Such effects are able to make to vary, in the course of many centuries, the average degree of heat; because the analytic expressions contain coefficients relating to the state of the surface and which greatly influence the temperature.
His ideas were followed up on by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. Working as a chemist, he was able to determine how much the temperature of the planet would increase for…
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