There’s a clipping from a 1912 New Zealand newspaper that goes viral every now and again. Noting that “the furnaces of the world” were now getting through two billion tons of coal annually, it muses whether the resulting carbon-dioxide emissions were creating a sort of blanket for the earth, causing our climate to warm.
There’d been a similar piece in an Australian paper a few weeks before, and both seem to have followed a larger feature in Popular Mechanics magazine that spring. Aware of “a general impression among older men” that the “good old-fashioned winters” they knew in their youth were no more, the author had gone digging in the weather records.
