A note predicting climate change was found in an old New Zealand newspaper.
A short note on how the use of fossil fuels has a detrimental effect on the climate appeared on August 14, 1912 - exactly 5 months after the Titanic sank. The New Zealand newspaper The Rodney and Otamatea Times posted it next to an article about the Russian idea of connecting the Black and Caspian Seas with a tunnel.
An unnamed author lamented that people burn 2 billion tons of coal a year in fireplaces, releasing 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which creates a greenhouse effect and contributes to higher temperatures. He ended with the prophetic words: "In just a few centuries, the effect can be quite tangible."
A note in a New Zealand newspaper is posted in the Science section
The article in The Rodney and Otamatea Times is not original - reprint. Earlier similar texts appeared in Australian newspapers - July 10, 1912 in The Shoalhaven Telegraph and July 17 in The Brainwood Dispatch. Someone had a good idea of the mechanism of global warming, its consequences and tried to warn the public. Did not help. The public did not heed.
Individual heating appliances in the form of fireplaces, of course, have diminished. Even in England. But the number of boilers, factories, power plants and other heat sources using fossil fuels has increased. As a result, as follows from the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached the highest level in 800 thousand years. And according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the five-year plan from 2011 to 2015 was the hottest in the history of meteorological observations. The hottest year was 2016, breaking the record of 2015.
A 105-year-old prophecy is coming true.
Fireplaces were not the most harmful devices
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The planet resists
American scientists from the University of California (University of California) assure that the Earth is "trying to prevent" large-scale climate change.
According to one of the study's authors, Joe Berry, the planet has turned on a self-regulation mechanism. It consists in the fact that terrestrial vegetation, by increasing photosynthesis, begins to more intensively absorb carbon dioxide.
According to the findings of Californian scientists, published in the journal Nature, over the past 200 years - since industrialization began - the absorption of carbon dioxide by plants has increased by 30 percent.
Alas, Berry laments, "the increase in photosynthesis is not large enough to compensate for the damage from burning fossil fuels." And the Earth alone is not able to withstand the damage from human activities. And what help can he get? None, except harm.
Grilling kebabs on coals? Contributing to global warming!
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY