A GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND?

Smoke as far as the eye can see (The Guardian, April 19th, 1873)

The airy wheels that rest on the skeleton scaffolding and the high pit banks around the shaft do not obtrude upon the sight as elsewhere. On the pleasant hills which encompass Oldham about, in the valley to which the town gently slopes, right in the streets and among the houses, wherever people may stand, there are "mills to the right of them, mills to the left of them, mills in the front of them, clatter and rumble".

Rising high, storey piled on storey, like oblong models of the incompleted [sic] Tower of Babel, or standing lower, square, and compact, like large family mansions in their own grounds, they extend throughout a boundless perspective, and the high stacks pouring out smoke in an endless volume, and pointing with silent finger to the skies they dim, may be seen stretching over hill and dale as far as the heavy clouds permit the eye to follow.

See them in the soft eventide, when the orb of day is slowly sinking behind the western hills, and the walls of flaring brick and the multitudinous windows, "whose panes the sunken sun incarnadines" glow with a universal ruddiness, and you seem to be looking upon the scene of a huge conflagration.

See them next by day, as the sooty exhalations roll up from the myriad fires that animate the loom and shuttle, and you may imagine the smoke to be rising from the unexpired embers of the evening's fire. From each of these giant structures all day long proceeds a sound like the murmuring of innumerable bees, and the air vibrates with the hum of industry.

One wonders how much of the current global warming scare can be put down to actual increases in greenhouse gases and how much to the fact that we have climate scientists with computer models and they did not.