rae121452
Literotica Guru
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This week in 1912, a newspaper printed a spot-on warning about our warming world. We're living in the future it predicted.
On August 14, 1912, a newspaper called the Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette printed a prescient paragraph in its "science notes and news" section.
The brief note warned that the Earth's atmosphere was changing because of the way the world's economies were ramping up production of fossil fuels.
It reads:
"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."
It's a stunningly succinct explanation for how people have contributed to the warming of the Earth's atmosphere.
The Kiwis weren't the first to ink the dire notice — the same text had been published a month earlier, on July 17, 1912, in Australia's Braidwood Dispatch. Before that, a March 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics was likely the very first printing of the words.
But the idea had already been bouncing around in the collective conscience of coal-burners worldwide for decades. In fact, the New York Times traces the scientific discussion of coal's effect on our atmosphere all the way back to the 1850s.
Today, we haven't changed our ways that much.
In 2016, the world consumed more than 5.3 billion metric tons of coal.
On August 14, 1912, a newspaper called the Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette printed a prescient paragraph in its "science notes and news" section.
The brief note warned that the Earth's atmosphere was changing because of the way the world's economies were ramping up production of fossil fuels.
It reads:
"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."
It's a stunningly succinct explanation for how people have contributed to the warming of the Earth's atmosphere.
The Kiwis weren't the first to ink the dire notice — the same text had been published a month earlier, on July 17, 1912, in Australia's Braidwood Dispatch. Before that, a March 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics was likely the very first printing of the words.
But the idea had already been bouncing around in the collective conscience of coal-burners worldwide for decades. In fact, the New York Times traces the scientific discussion of coal's effect on our atmosphere all the way back to the 1850s.
Today, we haven't changed our ways that much.
In 2016, the world consumed more than 5.3 billion metric tons of coal.
