How Artists, Writers and Scientists of the Past Documented Climate Change

Anne Wallentine History Correspondent “By the plague wind, every breath of air you draw is polluted,” wrote English art critic John Ruskin in 1884. He described the air pollution caused by industrialization as “the storm cloud—or, more accurately, plague cloud” of the 19th century, prefiguring the rapid development of anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change. In 2022, almost 140 years after Ruskin delivered…