Eunice Newton Foote

Let's pay a visit to the theater of life.

Back in 1856, Eunice Foote, an American scientist and suffragette, was thinking about how the sun's warmth affected different gases.

In those days, the scientific community was a- a bit like a fort with a handmade no girls allowed sign out front.

But Foote wasn't deterred and ran her experiments anyway.

Pouillet began measuring the planetary energy budget and pointed toward particular gases.

Then Eunice Newton Foote and John Tyndall would start testing gases directly.

And I love that progression because climate science didn't appear all at once in somebody's divine flash of insight.

One person found a discrepancy.

So yeah, let's keep going.

Can you summarize her contribution and then catch us up to the guy who began to question whether the oceans may not be able to capture the emissions human industry was generating?

Eunice Newton Foote enters the story in 1856, and I'm already fond of her because she did something beautifully direct.

She put different gases in glass cylinders, placed them in sunlight, and measured how hot they became.

So then, is John Tyndall actually the person who discovered the greenhouse effect? Digging deeper, his name dominates the search results.

But two other names were prominent, Joseph Fourier and Eunice Foote.

Let's look at both.

Hey Google, who is Joseph Fourier? David Wogan wrote an article in Scientific American explaining how our understanding of heat-trapping gases goes back to 1824 with Joseph Fourier.

As always, I encourage you to read for yourself and ask your own questions, but this is my short take.

Fourier figured out that our atmosphere traps and radiates heat, while Tyndall pinpointed the exact gases, like carbon dioxide, that are actually doing the work.

As for the other notable name in our findings, looking into Eunice Foote's contribution to this discovery reveals a lot, and much of it is controversial.

I like what I found on the New York City Public Schools website.

But scientists have known about this invisible blanket for a really long time.

In fact, an incredible woman named Eunice Newton Foote discovered this way back in 1856.

1856? That's almost 170 years ago.

They didn't even have gas-powered cars back then.

Let's see how you did on those.

The first answer is, humans emit about 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.

For question two, her name was Eunice Newton Foote, the 1856 climate pioneer.

Number three, the answer is, the oceans absorb about 90% of the excess heat.

But there are also some astonishing recoveries in the book.

For example, the story of Eunice Foote and her discoveries when it comes to experiments with gases and carbon dioxide and things that we would now associate as being so crucial to the climate movement.

Yeah, it's an incredible story about an American scientist and an inventor who was working in the sort of mid-1800s from a home laboratory who conducted an experiment that provided kind of a rudimentary evidence for what we today call the greenhouse effect.

And her discoveries, they were documented, but not really included in the most influential scientific journals of the time.

This poem is called A Muse of Global Warning.

And I have a quote by Eunice Foote.

An atmosphere of that gas, carbon dioxide, would give the Earth a high temperature.

This moment, before women were allowed to be science, defined what global warming was.