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Meet Eunice Foote: The woman who discovered global warming 168 years ago.

🧪 In August of 1856, Eunice Newton Foote noted the first discovery of what would come to be known as the greenhouse effect. Her experiments on the effects of the sun on air temperature found that air with higher levels of carbon dioxide resulted in much higher temperatures when exposed to the sun’s heat, and took longer to cool down.

The conclusion written in her work “On the Heat in the Sun’s Rays” reads, “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature... must have necessarily resulted (Foote, 1856).”

Foote’s work came three years before scientist John Tyndall’s, who has long been credited for coining the greenhouse effect. It’s unclear if Tyndall was familiar with Foote’s work or if he could have plagiarized it. Foote’s work was only uncovered in recent years.

Sources
👉 https://bit.ly/3cQFuya: https://bit.ly/49ONRXm

👉APS: https://bit.ly/4fnqzcd