File:Eunice Foote Illustration climate.gov.jpg

Illustration courtesy of Climate.gov

Eunice Foote

• https://www.climate.gov/news-features/features/happy-200th-birthday-eunice-foote-hidden-climate-science-pioneer

Foote’s experiments in the 1850s demonstrated the ability of atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide to affect solar heating, foreshadowing John Tyndall’s later experiments that described the workings of Earth’s greenhouse effect. Despite her remarkable insight into the influence that higher carbon dioxide levels in the past would have had on Earth’s temperature, Foote went unnoticed in the history of climate science until recently.

“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature”

Foote’s story takes place about a century before the women mentioned above. Foote was an amateur scientist—known as a natural philosopher in that era—who in the 1850s conducted some of the first experiments exploring the influence of different atmospheric gases on the “heat of the sun’s rays.”

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