This is a Popular Mechanics illustration from 102 years ago that sounds like it could have been written today. Warnings about industrial pollution increasing air temperature are nothing new. We (for some value of “we,” some group of humans who share information with each other) have known that our machines release gases at a volume large enough to change weather patterns for quite a long time now. We just can’t see it happening, not directly.
The text of the caption reads:
The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. 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.
I found the image while browsing Wikimedia Commons, but you can read the whole March 1912 Popular Mechanics here, at archive.org. There are charts, and prose like the following…which has a slightly Lovecraftian tinge, from a 21st-century perspective:
It is perhaps somewhat hazardous to make conjectures for centuries yet to come, but in the light of all that is known it is reasonable to conclude that not only has the brain of man contrived machines by means of which he can travel faster than the wind, navigate the ocean depths, fly above the clouds, and do the work of a hundred, but also that indirectly by these very things, which change the constitution of the atmosphere, have his activities reached beyond the near at hand and the immediate present and modified the cosmic processes themselves.
Of course, the inciting incident for the article was an unseasonable heat wave. It’s the only way anyone but a very few start to pay attention.