A Woman Warned Us About Climate Change 165 Years Ago. Naturally, We Ignored Her

Eunice Newton Foote's 1856 research foreshadowed how both climate change and women would be treated by society for decades. The first kind of, sort of, maybe global action on climate change, the Kyoto protocol, didn't come until 140 years later.

Since the 1800s, humans have had plenty of warnings about the dangers of climate change for the future of the planet and life as we know it. One of the first instances of a scientist sounding the alarm came in the 1850s, during the American Industrial Revolution, from a woman named Eunice Newton Foote. And let's just say her research foreshadowed how both climate change and discerning women would be treated by society for decades to come.

Foote wasn't allowed to present her own work at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856. Nope, the highly regarded Joseph Henry, first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, did that. And while her research was published twice, it got only a page and a half in the American Journal of Science and Arts in November 1856 and a short summary in the Annual of Scientific Discovery the following year, according to Climate.gov.

Her experiments are now considered a precursor to those done in 1859 by John Tyndall, who proved the greenhouse effect comes from gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide absorbing heat radiated from the surface of the Earth (not the sun's rays) and redirecting it back toward Earth. But Tyndall cited a fellow male scientist in his research, not Foote.

"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," Climate.gov explained in 2019 to celebrate her 200th birthday.

https://www.nbcchicago.com/lx/a-woman-tried-to-warn-us-about-climate-change-165-years-ago-naturally-we-ignored-her/2680131/