It's not just 21st-century Americans who worry about climate change. Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries debated whether the New World's weather was getting worse in their lifetimes.
Climate change is perhaps the most important issue of the 21st century. It was also a topic of profound interest to the Founding Fathers of the United States. Thomas Jefferson had an interest that bordered on the obsessive. On July 1, 1776, just as he was drafting the Declaration of Independence, he began to keep a diary in which he recorded two temperature readings a day for the next 50 years.
The scientist and statesman Hugh Williamson, a future delegate to the Constitutional Convention, agreed with Jefferson. He argued that deforestation and farming were giving North America a smoother surface, which reflected light and heat “like any polished metal.” But Noah Webster, of dictionary fame, retorted that this was all nonsense. Jefferson was relying on anecdotal evidence from “elderly and middle-age people” who claimed summers and winters used to be cooler.
Part of the bewilderment stemmed from the fact that Europeans crossing the Atlantic discovered flora and fauna that were unfamiliar to them, as a result of the geological and ecological lottery that had kept the great connected landmass of Europe, Africa and Asia apart from those of North and South America. The New World’s climate, too, was sharply different from what scientists had predicted.
Not everyone was displeased when disease struck local populations. King James I noted that “a wonderful plague” in the early 17th century had brought about “the utter destruction, devastation and depopulation” of the region that became New England. God was to thank for the fact that colonization would now be much easier.
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