‘Climate Change’ has been the buzzword for the last decade gaining more popularity as the years pass and the oceans keep rising with nations promising a lot and doing very little to combat global warming. ‘Climate change’ may now be a term everybody knows and no longer has to look up the dictionary definition of, but scientists have been predicting it for years - but with little action. But it’s not recent years that have caused this: Climate change was predicted over 165 years ago, all the way back in 1856 by a scientist, whose research was instantly dismissed. NBC’s LX in a new report found how her “research foreshadowed how both climate change and discerning women would be treated by society for decades to come."
Eunice Newton Foote was an American scientist who is credited with research on how increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to global warming. However, she wasn’t credited for the discovery until 2011. According to a Physics Today report, “the world has instead remembered John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, as the person who discovered the warming potential of carbon dioxide and water vapor—even though he published his findings three years after Foote."
So how did Foote discover climate change? According to a Climate.gov report from 2019, she used “glass cylinders, each encasing a mercury thermometer," to discover that the heating effect of the Sun was greater in moist air than dry air, and that it was highest of all in a cylinder containing carbon dioxide. She wrote, “The receiver containing this gas became itself much heated—very sensibly more so than the other—and on being removed [from the Sun], it was many times as long in cooling.” Foote used an air pump, four mercury thermometers, and two glass cylinders: She first placed two thermometers in each cylinder, then by using the air pump, she evacuated the air from one cylinder and compressed it in the other. Allowing both cylinders to reach the same temperature, she placed the cylinders in the sunlight to measure temperature variance once heated and under different moisture conditions. She performed this experiment on CO2, common air, and hydrogen, reported a Quartz article in 2018. The Climate.gov report also mentioned how her work was presented on August 23, 1856, at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)— “not by her, but by a male colleague, the eminent Joseph Henry. Neither Foote’s paper, nor Henry’s presentation of it, were included in the conference proceedings, however."
In her experiment, she’d written, “An atmosphere of that gas [carbon dioxide] would give our Earth a high temperature," hence starting the premise of what is the most basic climate change science. A copy of her paper called “On The Heat and the Sun’s Ray’s" is now available on Google as an e-Book. If only people had read her, or the scientists that followed in the years since - and listened to it.
Climate change in 2021 is only getting worse and - even in the most optimistic scenario, where global greenhouse gas emissions begin to decline right now and are slashed to net-zero by 2050, global temperature will still peak above the 1.5-degree threshold before falling. Cycles of floods caused by heavy bursts of rainfall and a rise in droughts due to increased evaporation, are potentially what India’s climate future will look like as the world barrels towards breaching the 1.5 degree Celsius ceiling for global warming by 2040, a UN report has said.
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