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"COAL CONSUMPTION AFFECTING CLIMATE"

On Wednesday 14 August 1912, readers of the Rodney & Otamatea Times (New Zealand) were greeted with the headline - "COAL CONSUMPTION AFFECTING CLIMATE."

Under tha banner of “Science Notes and News” on page 7 of the newspaper, the short article appeared under snippets on a very deep hole in Germany and on a new “machine for skipping” that not only “turns the rope but records the number of skips”. More than a century later the paragraph-long report has viral on social media over the summer.

“COAL CONSUMPTION AFFECTING CLIMATE, - The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year,” it began. 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.”

And that was it. The "Science Notes and News" continued with other articles such as the qualities of asparagus in light of the “awful odour which the use of this article of food causes in one of the bodily excretions”.

At the time the article was published, the CO₂ levels were around 295 parts per million molecules of air. In July 2022 the CO2 levels were 419 parts per million – more than 50% higher than pre-industrial times.
In 2019, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher than ever than they have been in at least the last 2 million years [IPCC - State of Global Climate 2021].
Concentrations of CH4 and N2O were higher than at any other point in time in at least 800,000 years [IPCC - State of Global Climate 2021].
In 2021, Global Mean Surface Temperature was 1.11 ± 0.13 °C warmer than the pre-industrial baseline (1850-1900) [IPCC - State of Global Climate 2021].
In 2021, the EU production of hard coal was 57 million tonnes, 79 % less than the 277 million tonnes of 1990 [Eurostat].

The 1912 New Zealand snippet was likely based on a four-page spread from Popular Mechanics magazine titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate – What Scientists Predict for the Future”, which drew from the work of Swedish scientist Svente Arrhenius and others.