Climate change has been one of the most debated environmental issues in the world during recent years.In Canton it isn’t a new discussion.Articles about the changing climate have been printed on pages of The Canton Repository for nearly its entire history, stretching back more than two centuries to the days when it was a weekly publication printed under the name The Ohio Repository.Reports didn’t always center on “global warming.””Has the earth changed its axis and its poles?” asked an article from the Weekly Recorder, datelined Circleville, Ohio, and republished in the Repository on the front page of its July 13, 1820, issue. “Or has an accumulation of ice within the polar circles produced a change in our once mild climate?””If this climate has been growing colder during three centuries in the same ratio it has within the last thirty years, we need not look further for a cause than the greater prevalence of that current of air rushing across our inland seas, Erie, Michigan,Huron, Superior, etc, from the regions of perennial frost.”Finding warmth in the worldA more in-depth investigation into climate change published in the July 3, 1845, issue of the Repository began to focus on global warming in a manner that made it appear this wasn’t a new observation.”The extraordinary change of climate, at periods of long duration, has been observed and commented on, and wondered at, by everyone who has paid the least attention to the subject,” the article began. “It is a general subject of remark, in this part of the country that our winters are now much milder than formerly. In the recollection of many of our citizens, our rivers used to be regularly frozen over, so that they could be crossed by a s …
The Monday After: Getting historical perspective on climate change – Canton Repository
