A hundred and eleven years ago, on this day, July 17, 1912, the New South Wales Braidwood Dispatch and Mining Journal ran a clipping (based on a Popular Mechanics article, about “Coal Consumption Affecting Climate.”) https://www.braidwoodtimes.com.au/story/3848574/old-news-goes-viral/
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 301ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
This is one of those delicious findings that yes, people were thinking about possible consequences of all the coal- this is in the afterlife of the Arrhenius and Chamberlain. But of course, the scientists had stopped looking because, thanks to Angstrom, they had convinced themselves that carbon dioxide was quickly saturated, and therefore irrelevant to any heating effect. And it was all about the water vapour.
So this finding is the sort of thing that you find on the internet and occasionally it gets sent to me as somehow proof that “everybody knew.” But I really do strongly believe that before Plass and Keeling it was entirely understandable to be deeply skeptical about the link, and even with Plass and Keeling and so forth it’s really only the late 1970s onwards that you can start to think about putting people on trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity. I know that’s convenient, because it is at that point that we get eight years of neoliberals blocking before the ‘breathrough’ in mid-1988. But anyway, I digress.
What I think we can learn from this
The idea had been ‘in the air’ for a while..
What happened next
Nothing, because the science was most definitely not settled…
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.