The Congressman Who Warned Us About Climate Change in 1864
The Congressman Who Warned Us About Climate Change in 1864
George Perkins Marsh wrote a best-selling book warning about the devastation of man-made climate change in the 19th century. We've been backsliding ever since.
ANDREW BELONSKY
04.20.18 11:02 PM ET
George Perkins Marsh minced no words: “Man everywhere is a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord.”
So began Man and Nature, the Vermont congressman and U.S. ambassador’s in-depth summation of man-made climate change, a book that laid out in simple terms how man changed the world for the worse and how that change was going to bury us in dust. A bestseller, it was hailed as a sea-change when it first hit shelves in 1864.
Yeah, you read that right: 1864, 154 years ago. Why hasn’t America listened?
Marsh’s love for nature is traced to Woodstock, Vermont, where this son of a prominent lawyer grew up in the early 1800s, when the land was still frontier wild and where Marsh communed with the ancient oaks, maple, and ash endemic to the region.
More:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-congressman-who-warned-us-about-climate-change-in-1864.html
Also posted in Editorials and other articles:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016205189
= new reply since forum marked as read
The climate change of concern today, driven by atmospheric CO2 released by burning fossil fuels, was not detectable in the 19th century, and burning fossil fuels had just barely begun. Marsh rightly pointed out the negative ways in which we have affected ecosystems, but that is very distinct from what we mean today when we speak of "climate change."
Other examples in the article are even more misleading. The Cotton Mather and Thomas Jefferson quotes, dating to 1721 and 1745, are about regional temperature dips ("Little Ice Age"
of non-human origin. They were not prescient observations about anthropogenic climate change.
