Getting A Little Warm Here

August 18, 2022 By: Half Empty Category: Uncategorized

Have you seen this 110 year-old newspaper clipping dated August 14, 1912?

First, we need a fact check. Is this 110 year-old article predicting a “considerable” rise in global temperature the real thing? Yes, it is.

A startling prediction from so long ago. Al Gore may have invented the internet, but someone in New Zealand beat him out on introducing global climate change (however, when AL said it some people listened).

I’m intrigued that the forecast allowed that this considerable rise was going to become a problem “in a few centuries”. Probably true at the time, but that’s only if you consider a steady state of consumption which we all know just hasn’t happened.

In fact, we burn over 4 times as much coal these days (8.5 billion tons/yr) than in 1912. But that’s only 52% of today’s world fossil fuel consumption. Carbon dioxide yield from petroleum is about 80% of what on average we get from coal. Using this crude estimate, consuming petroleum is roughly equivalent to burning an additional 6.3 billion tons of coal for a grand total of 14.8 billion tons. Burned up, that’s over 7 times the rate of coal consumption in 1912, and hence 7 times the CO2 production.

“A few centuries” now appears to be an over-estimate. And yeah, it’s getting a little warm here.

Be social and share!

0 Comments to “Getting A Little Warm Here”


  1. Ignorant dimwits have been and will continue to ignore anything that will interfere with their comfortable easy life. As they like to say…’I got mine, pluck the rest of you’! And why worry about my great-great-grandkids? I will be dead by then so don’t care. Rich people will NOT give up anything as they get rich by ignoring anything but themselves!!! And this is is so down thru the ages!

    1
  2. WA Skeptic says:

    @#1: I submit that the masses tend to cling to their comforts as well.

    A good way to slow the degradation of the atmosphere is to maintain the WFH that we are doing now due to the pandemic. The effects of commuting and the thousands of cars/trucks on the roads will be much alleviated by NOT going back to the office.

    2
  3. @2: We just got ordered back to the office 3 days a week. I am SO PISSED!!! Working from home is so much more convenient AND it’s good for the environment. I code for a living and, to me, the “collaboration” the CEO talks about is total BS. Thinking about a change…

    3
  4. A quibble. VP Gore did not claim or say that he invented the internet. That was a canard trumpeted by the right wing to discredit him. He was instrumental in creating legislation expanding availability and use of the technology, to his credit.

    4
  5. Grandma Ada says:

    Climate change is quite visible in impressionist artwork from that period. Landscapes in cities have hazy or even red skies. It’s not fog you see in the London streets, it’s smog.

    5
  6. The Surly Professor says:

    Half Empty: Gore never said he “invented” the Internet.
    What he said in 1999 was “”During my service in the U.S. Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” Which the media turned into “I created the Internet”. The NSF had taken over some funding of the Internet but it did not have the budget to handle it all. What Gore did was to organize Congress to shift the funding to a more permanent basis, part of the 1991 High Performance Computing Act. That was one of the best investments of a billion greenbacks the US government has ever made.

    Personally even the claim of “creating” the Internet rankles me. I strongly object when some university administrator takes credit for “building” a supercomputing center. They may have managed the budget and defended the turf against enemies, but invariably the grants paying for it were written by professors, paid for by the NSF, NIH, and other funding agencies, and the actual design and engineering done by systems staff. I’m the obnoxious dweeb who will not let them get away with using any of the resume-building verbs (build, invent, create, design). I’ll ask them questions in public like “why did you choose this interconnect network? what job submission scheduling software is being used? how did you arrive at the intermediate data storage requirements?” In 45 years in this racket, I’ve only encountered one who actually could answer such questions … and he was the only one who would never claim to have “built” the system.

    Sorry for going off like that. The only thing in my working life that makes me more furious is when some payroll ogre tries to cheat me out of my pay. But those cases long preceded my academic career.

    Oh, if you want to know what Gore *really* could brag about:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology

    6
  7. Swedish scientist Arrhenius published a paper in 1896 outlining the dangers of burning fossil fuel.

    7
  8. Surly Professor @ 5,

    It was DARPA, not Gore who invented the internet.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA

    8
  9. Half Empty says:

    Guys. I know AL Gore didn’t “invent” the internet. I know that. Sometimes I’ll use right wing tropes with a dry twist (some might say arid). Juanita Jean has a tough room.

    9
  10. Don’t worry, Half Empty, the memory of that period in history when Al Gore should have won the presidential election but for some ridiculous hanging chads excuse and the treatment he received from Republicans who ridiculed him for saying that which he did NOT say, and their absolute denial of climate change, still rankles in our hearts and memories. The tough room emanates from there, not your sarcastic essay.

    10
  11. The Surly Professor says:

    maryelle, I’m horrified that you would suggest us denizens of TWMDBS woud engage in sarcasm or snark. We are serious minded folks, not the kind who would go in for a lime green or dayglo orange hair dye treatment. Maybe a blue tint for those of us getting on in years, but that’s traditional and accepted in Baptist churches everywhere.

    Half Empty: I’m glad you’re posting here, and don’t take what I typed in as an attack on you or your coverage. I apologize if it came out that way.

    [As for snark, I wallow in it. I find it hard to breathe in 2022 USA without it. Assume it with any of my postings!]

    11
  12. Perhaps not snark nor sarcasm, but definitely
    SURLY!

    12
  13. Bruce.desertrat says:

    Al Gore never said he invented the internet. Moreover, two of the three people who arguably did help “invent the internet” defended his contributions strongly.

    Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Ray Tomlinson developed the fundamental communcations protocol of the Internet, TCP/IP.

    This is what they had to say about Al Gore’s contributions:

    https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

    13
  14. Half Empty says:

    See #9-#12 above.

    14