Eunice Foote nailed Climate Change in 1856
After a short break courtesy of La Nina, it looks like climate change is getting crazy again. We haven’t been too affected so far in the Northern Rivers this year but between floods in Germany, huge bushfires from California to Siberia, and recently sand storms in China, we are well into it.
It’s only in the last few years that climate change has been in the media, but its main cause, i.e. the greenhouse effect, has been known for a long time. Until recently we thought an Irish scientist named John Tyndall had nailed it. But according to a newly digitised copy of the American Journal of Science and Arts, a lady named Eunice Foote beat him by a few years.
Armed with two glass cylinders and four mercury thermometers, Eunice engaged in a series of experiments. With air in one cylinder, she filled the other one with various gases and compared the temperature rises of the cylinders when exposed to sunlight. And guess what, she found that CO2 had the cake. It got up to 52°C!
Eunice described her findings in a paper entitled “Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun's rays that was read at the eighth annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting on August 23, 1856 in Albany, NY.”
Surely she could not predict that the CO2 level would increase from 290 ppm to 400 ppm, largely due to human activities, prompting a global crisis. However it was a fantastic insight at the time.
References:
Eunice Newton Foote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote
Portrait of Eunice: Kent State University
https://www.kent.edu/magazine/eunice-foote-finally-gets-some-credit
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