Scientific analysis pointing to a human role in warming the climate through burning fossil fuels goes back to 1896, with Svante Arrhenius’s remarkable paper, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid [Carbon Dioxide] in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”

Starting in the late 1930s, Guy Stewart Callendar, a British engineer and amateur meteorologist, stirred the field by calculating that rising carbon dioxide levels were already warming the climate. Check out his 1938 paper on the subject: “The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature.”

By 1956, The New York Times was writing on combustion-driven global warming.

But when did news coverage begin?

The earliest (and most concise!) article I’ve seen was published on Aug. 14, 1912, in a couple of New Zealand newspapers, the Rodney and Otamatea Times and Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette:

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The item is available online thanks to Fairfax Media and the Papers Past archive of the National Library of New Zealand. It came to my attention via the sleuthing of Danny Bloom, a longtime presence on Dot Earth best known for his focus on the emerging literary genre “cli fi” — climate fiction.

On his blog, Bloom pointed to a great Oct. 18 piece on the climate article by Alex Kasprak for Snopes, the invaluable ( and overworked) truth detector for web content. (Kasprak actually found the item, author unknown, had been published a month earlier in Australia.)

The little story, of course, projected future warming on a far slower time scale than what scientists are projecting with a century of accumulated science and data:

The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, united 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.

[Inserted Oct. 31 | Kasprak’s Snopes article got to bedrock, finding that the passage derives from a caption in a March, 1912, Popular Mechanics article on the “Remarkable Weather of 1911.“]

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I’m eager to find earlier news coverage, in any language, of human-driven global warming. There are some earlier pieces in The Times, found by searching the Times Machine archive for “coal, climate, atmosphere” and the like, but nothing quite this direct. Please put out the word!

Postscript | After publication, Cameron Muir, a writer in Canberra, Australia, pointed me to his fascinating Medium.com piece on his sift for early news on greenhouse-driven global warming. He’d tweeted about the 1912 item (the one from Australia) back in December last year.

Peter A. Shulman, a historian and author of “Coal and Empire,” tweeted an image of an article from the May 12, 1912, edition of The Daily Picayune* newspaper in New Orleans that seems to imply more of a toxic, than climatic, impact from the buildup of carbon dioxide through fuel burning and the loss of trees to sop up the gas:

@Revkin @dotearth This one’s from May 12, 1912, New Orleans Times-Piucayune, pg 8; not apparently linked to Arrheni… https://t.co/JBROgbeHRc — Peter A. Shulman (@pashulman) 21 Oct 16

Several newspaper articles in 1883, including one in The Times, point back to a Nature article in 1883:

@Revkin @dotearth Another 1883 editorial on the Nature article about CO2. Printed in a number of papers. https://t.co/mmHXW7LKmF — Jeff Nichols (@backwards_river) 22 Oct 16

Much more early coverage of the carbon dioxide/climate connection, including this Twitter item from Jeff Nichols:

@Revkin @dotearth G. W. Furey speaking in 1901 about his theory of global warming. https://t.co/uSBzhgZ8K5 — Jeff Nichols (@backwards_river) 22 Oct 16

And here’s more from David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council:

@revkin London Morning Post 6/15/1859 on Tyndall’s Royal Institution lecture: “retained by the absorbing power of t… https://t.co/wZ6CGnlab7 — David Hawkins (@dahawk7843) 22 Oct 16

Jeff Nichols, a historian and graduate student at the University of Chicago, has done a remarkable amount of archive sleuthing and tweeted an astounding string of ancient stories on coal, carbon dioxide and climate on Twitter. Here’s one example:

@Revkin @pashulman CO2 anxiety: a 1899 article warning of the possible depletion of oxygen in the atmosphere due t… https://t.co/2T5k66IS8H — Jeff Nichols (@backwards_river) 30 Oct 16

And another Nichols gem!

@Revkin @pashulman T. Sterry Hunt connecting Tyndall’s work on CO2 with the warmth of the coal age, 1867. Note the… https://t.co/1R7kCTCtte — Jeff Nichols (@backwards_river) 6 Nov 16