A Forgotten Pioneer of Climate Change Research

Abstract

In almost every textbook on climate change, the discovery of the greenhouse effect is attributed to John Tyndall, an influential Irish scientist who did most of his work in the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Through his experiments, reported in 1859, Tyndall showed how the concentration of gases such as carbon dioxide could lead to atmospheric heating, resulting in global warming.Three years before Tyndall, an American woman scientist had presented a pioneering experimental result that showed how gases influenced heating in the atmosphere. That scientist was Eunice Newton Foote.