She Discovered the Cause of Global Warming Over 150 Years Ago!

In this historical moment, attempts to strip women of their rights are occurring again (some rights have already been successfully removed). I believe we must continue to highlight extraordinary women. Women who were relegated to dusty archives somewhere as if they never existed. But they existed!  Not only did they exist, but they contributed immensely to the development of civilization. 

This woman typifies raw intelligence, true dedication, and persistence. She is an example of someone who recognized the sacredness of the Earth and sought to protect our Mother. Eunice Foote was a rare female scientist in her time. 

Born on July 17, 1819, Eunice Newton Foote was an amateur scientist and a women’s rights campaigner who was friends with American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She grew up in Bloomfield, New York, and attended Troy Female Seminary, whose founder, Emma Willard, believed in educating young women in all subjects, including science. Eunice enjoyed science and documented the physics of climate change in the 1800s and sent out explicit warnings about this basic science. Sadly, the world didn’t listen. 

Before the U.S. Civil War and certainly before the current political divide and crisis over climate change today, Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change. In 1856, Eunice, after conducting many experiments in her home laboratory, wrote a paper about the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat. Her conclusion was revolutionary. She wrote that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature.” She was the first to talk about the driving force of global warming. 

Carbon dioxide is an odorless, tasteless, transparent gas that is created when people burn fuels, including coal, oil, gasoline, and wood. The idea that the atmosphere trapped heat was known, but not understood. The cause remained a mystery. 

As the earth’s surface heats, you might think that heat would just radiate back to space. But it doesn’t The atmosphere stays hotter than expected largely because of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor in the atmosphere. Together, they are what we know as “greenhouse gases,” named so because, not unlike the glass in a greenhouse, they trap the earth’s heat and radiate it back to the surface of the planet. 

Eunice’s experiment was a simple one. She put a thermometer in each of the two glass cylinders, pumped carbon dioxide gas into one and air into the other. She set the cylinders in the sun. The one containing the carbon dioxide got much hotter than the other. It was then she concluded what she had suspected: carbon dioxide quickly absorbs heat. “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.” This led her to the conclusion that…” if the air had mixed with it a higher proportion of Caron dioxide than at present, and increased temperature would result.” It was noted after many experiments that carbon dioxide must produce a change of climate having severe effects. 

Sadly, Eunice faced a real problem. In 1856, being a woman prevented her from presenting her findings to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A male colleague read her work while she sat quietly in the audience. A minor scientific journal published it, and then everyone promptly forgot about it. Meanwhile, a fellow scientist, John Tyndall, began some of his own experimentation based on her research. He reached the same conclusion as Eunice had. He became famous as the “Father of climate change.” 

In 2010, a retired geologist found Eunice Foot’s paper and broth the true story to light. Today we are facing the climate change that she predicted, and we can finally recognize Eunice Foote as the true pioneer of climate change science. It is also a reminder of the struggle women have endured to emerge in science and society. Also, a stark realization that the basic elements of climate science, such as the warming potential of carbon dioxide, were being recognized over 150 years ago. 

For further reading: Smithsonian Magazine, “The Woman Who Discovered the Cause of Global Warming.” 

The Search for Eunice Foote by Raymond Sorenson