A news clipping expressing alarm over what we know now as the climate crisis has resurfaced on Twitter – dating back to August 14, 1912.
The clipping, from the now defunct The Rodney & Otamatea Times, has the headline: “Coal consumption affecting climate.”
It continues: “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 short news item is a big deal because it shows humans have known about the connection between fossil fuels, CO2 emissions and global warming for more than a century.
The New Zealand newspaper has made the rounds before – in 2016, the fact-checking website Snopes.com verified the post, noting it was found in the digital archives of the National Library of New Zealand.
The exact same story appeared in an Australian newspaper released on July 17, 1912, issue of The Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal – and that’s in archives for the National Library of Australia.
Snopes pointed out it seemed to be a reprint of a March 1912 article called Popular Mechanics which was commenting on the “remarkable weather of 1911”.
The resurgence of the news clipping is particularly uncomfortable because, with every year, it feels like the climate crisis is becoming more pressing.
The last few months alone have seen some shocking changes to the weather all around the world, including wildfires and floods.
The post also proves that we’ve known about the dangers of burning fossil fuels for some time.
It was scientist Eunice Newton Foot who discovered in 1856 that some gases warm up when exposed to the sun, and that increases in CO2 would change the atmosphere’s temperature.
Then the term “greenhouse gases” was coined in 1896 by a Swedish scientist called Svante Arrhenius, who estimated how much the Earth was warming due to an accumulation of gases in our atmosphere, later linking this to human activity.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences claimed in a 2008 tribute to the scientist that these ideas “received great public interest” at first.
However, it added they “typically waned in time” before they were revived in 1950s, when the science community started to measure the amount of CO2 in the air.
Nowadays, campaigns like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion cause disruption in an effort to stop the use of fossil fuels and slow the climate crisis.