The letter below gets some things right and quite a bit wrong. What it does show is that 133 years ago, back in 1883, the general public was reading about how burning coal is polluting the atmosphere. Other newspaper flashbacks can be seen here, including my favourite, from 1884. Weirdly, there are still a few very vocal people who think gravity is a hoax or should I say the equivalent - that climate science is a hoax. From the Wallaroo Times, South Australia, Saturday 1 September 1883
(The paragraph breaks and emphasis are mine.)
Pollution of the Atmosphere
There was a letter in Nature some time since, calling attention to the pollution of the atmosphere by the burning of coal; and it was calculated that in the year 1900, all animal life would cease, from the amount of carbonic dioxide; but, the author had overlooked the fact that the rain is continually cleansing the atmosphere of this, and the fall of this rain on the ground, and the combination of this with various salts ; besides the oceans alone would absorb their own bulk at normal pressure, but at an increased pressure of, say half a mile deep, would dissolve more than we are likely to need for hundreds of years.
But there are other products of combustion, or rather of incomplete combustion, that are not brought down in this manner by rain, as hydrogen and the hydrocarbons, chiefly marsh gas and ethylene. The latter has, I believe, been observed by the spectroscope on the Alps, and was supposed to have come from space.
