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The Most Important Sign Of The Present Time
We may look back at the past, but our eyes are still here in the present. The same goes for the future.
Someone recently sent me this excerpt from a 1912 article:
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 raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
An article from 1912 warning about climate change. My reaction was to be expected: surprise, awe, outrage. We knew. We knew it was happening and we did nothing.
However, the article wasn’t exactly a warning. My current, early-twenty-first century outlook blurred my sight as my confirmation bias worked its magic. A sign of our times.
Every word has a connotation. It’s not the word’s fault: languages don’t have political leanings. Regardless of how many ideological battles we fight within them, the battles are ours. Languages are simply the battlefields we unfortunately choose for our quarrels.
That said, let’s check the words used in the above snippet: ”affecting”, “uniting“…