Eunice Foote: the mother of climate change

Eunice Foote’s 1856 paper on the ‘circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays’ describes the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and pre-dated John Tyndall’s similar conclusions by three years. Foote’s paper was presented at the 10th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Albany, New York. But presumably because women were not allowed to present their work, her paper was read by the eminent American scientist, Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Her experiments involved testing the effects of sunlight on various air and gas samples in two glass cylinders. The warming effect of air inside a glass tube – the ‘greenhouse effect’ – had been described in 1770, but Foote’s experiments compared the different temperature increases with moist and dry air, as well as carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen.

It’s not clear whether John Tyndall – whose 1859 paper is usually credited as being the first to suggest the link – was aware of Foote’s work. With climate change now posing such a serious threat, her research could hardly have more significance.