Climate woes tip 100 years ago

A North Auckland community newspaper appears to have predicted climate change more than 100 years ago.

The news snippet announced that coal consumption was producing tons of carbon dioxide each year and could raise temperatures in the atmosphere significantly.

After the clipping went up on Twitter many assumed it was a hoax. Published in the Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette - dated August 14, 1912 - the current Rodney Times has been contacted from as far away as Finland asking if it is authentic.

Records for the newspaper can be found online at the National Library of New Zealand. And sure enough, on August 14 1912, the four sentence piece Coal Consumption Affecting Climate appears.

Then links turned up on Twitter that showed the piece had also appeared earlier in Australian newspapers - the Shoalhaven Telegraph in 10 July 1912 and the Braidwood Dispatch newspaper and mining journal on 17 July 1912.

The story was probably a ‘‘filler’’ that was syndicated across many papers at that time, environmental historian Dr Cameron Muir, at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, said.

That burning coal was affecting the atmosphere had been known for a lot longer than people realised, he said.

Often this type of article appeared after a natural scientist gave a lecture in one of the capital cities.

It most likely appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald first before being picked up elsewhere including in New Zealand.

It also fits in with the early timeline on the greenhouse effect and the effects of burning coal.

1824 - Joseph Fourier, a French physicist, describes the Earth’s natural ‘‘greenhouse effect’’.

1859 - John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, shows the greenhouse effect is created by water vapour and other gases including carbon dioxide and describes it as a necessary blanket around the Earth.

1896 - Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, recognises industrial-age coal burning will add to the natural greenhouse effect. He calculates a doubling of CO2 will raise the global temperature by several degrees Celsius.

‘‘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,’’ Muir said, with newspapers consistently reporting the latest in climate science over much of the 20th century. - Fairfax NZ