Story of how humanity has ignored a known threat for over a century
On August 14, 1912, a small New Zealand newspaper published a short article announcing that the global use of coal was affecting the temperature of our planet.
This 110-year-old news release is now famous and shared across the internet every year as one of the first climate science news stories in the media (although it was actually a reprint of a story published in a NSW mining magazine). South a month before).
Then,why has it taken so long to listen and act before the warnings of the article?
American scientist and women’s rights activist Eunice Foote is now widely recognized as the first person to demonstrate the greenhouse effect in 1856several years before UK researcher John Tyndall published similar results.
His rudimentary experiments showed that carbon dioxide and water vapor can absorb heat, which, amplified, can affect the temperature of the earth. Therefore, we have known the relationship between greenhouse gases and the Earth’s temperature for at least 150 years.
Four decades later, Swedish scientist Svente Arrhenius did some basic calculations to estimate how much the Earth’s temperature would change. if we doubled the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. At the time, CO₂ levels hovered around 295 parts per million air molecules. This year, we reached 421 parts per million, over 50% higher than in the pre-industrial era.
Arrhenius estimated that doubling CO₂ would produce a 5℃ hotter world. This figure, thankfully, is higher than modern calculations, but it’s not too far off, considering he wasn’t using any fancy computers! At the time, the Swede was more concerned about the possible arrival of a new ice age than global warming, but by the 1900s he was already shocking his students with the news that the world was slowly warming due to coal burning.
Climate Science Overshadowed by Oil Boom
The 1912 New Zealand excerpt was probably based on a four-page report published in the magazine Popular Mechanicswhich in turn built on the work of Arrhenius and others.
When climate advocates point to the existence of articles like this and say we already knew there was going to be climate change, they overlook the fact that Arrhenius’s ideas were generally considered fringe, meaning not many people took them seriously. . In fact, there was a backlash over carbon dioxide’s role as a greenhouse gas.
When World War I began, the issue lost momentum. Oil began to rise, leaving out promising technologies like electric cars, which in 1900 held a third of the fledgling market. against this, technological developments on fossil fuels and military objectives took advantage. The idea that humans could affect the entire planet with these activities remained outside of any debate.
1930s: The Callendar Effect
It was not until the 1930s that human-induced climate change resurfaced. british engineer Guy Callendar gathered weather observations from around the world and found that temperatures had already risen.
Callendar was the first to clearly identify a warming trend and connect it to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, but he downplayed the importance of CO₂ compared to water vapour, another potent greenhouse gas.
Like the 1912 article, Callendar also underestimated the rate of warming we would see in the next 80 years. to your first results. He predicted that the world would be only 0.39 ℃ warmer by the year 2000, instead of the 1 ℃ we observe. However, he caught the attention of researchers, sparking an intense scientific debate.
But in the late 1930s, the world went to war once again. Callendar’s discoveries quickly took a backseat to the battles and subsequent need for reconstruction.
The merchants of doubt come into action
In 1957, scientists began the International Geophysical Year, which involved intense investigation of the Earth, its poles, and atmosphere. This involved the creation of atmospheric monitoring stations that track the constant increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans. And at the same time, oil companies were realizing the impact their business was having on Earth.
During these post-war decades, there continued to be little political debate about the climate. Margaret Thatcher, hardly classifiable as a leftist, saw global warming as a clear threat during her time as UK Prime Minister. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen gave his famous speech to the United States Congress stating that global warming was already here.
The momentum for awareness of the problem was growing. Many conservationists took heart from the Montreal Protocol, which more or less stopped the hole in the ozone layer from growing. Could we do the same to stop climate change?
As we now know, we did not. Phasing out a class of chemicals was one thing. But weaning ourselves off the fossil fuels on which the modern world was built? That would be much more difficult.
Climate change became politicized and pro-business conservative parties around the world embraced the climate skepticism doctrine. The media often included a skeptic’s version for the sake of “balance”. This, in turn, led many people to believe that the ‘jury’ was still out, when in fact science was speaking ever more surely and clearly.
Due to this skepticism there were long delays in decision making. The 1992 Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing greenhouse gases took until 2005 to be ratified. Science, and scientists themselves, were attacked. A fierce fight soon got underway, with heated arguments, often funded by fossil fuel interests, challenging the overwhelming scientific evidence.
Unfortunately for us, these noisy efforts succeeded in delaying action. People who refuse to accept science supported the fossil fuel industry for at least another decade, even as climate change continued to escalate, with natural disasters and increasingly intense heat waves.
The best time to act was 1912. The next best time is now.
After decades of setbacks, climate science and social movements are now calling louder than ever for strong and meaningful action.
The science is beyond question. While the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 1990 stated that global warming “could be due in large part to natural variability,” the latest from 2021 states that humans “unequivocally […] They have warmed the atmosphere, the ocean and the land.
We have even seen a welcome change in the previously skeptical media. And as we saw in the federal elections in May, public opinion is on the side of the planet.
National and international climate policies are stronger than everand while much remains to be done, it finally appears that government, business, and public sentiment are all moving in the same direction.
Let’s use the 110th anniversary of this short excerpt as a reminder to keep talking and finally pushing for the change we must bring about.
Linden Ashcroft is a researcher at the University of Melbourne (Australia)
Reference article: https://theconversation.com/for-110-years-climate-change-has-been-in-the-news-are-we-finally-ready-to-listen-188646
……..
Environment section contact: [email protected]
…….
ttn-25