Unappreciated Female Pioneer in Global-Warming Research

[lpetrich]

Many female scientists of the past have been underappreciated or unappreciated, and one was recently pointed out. Why We Can't Forget Eunice Foote's Climate Science Work | Time

Eunice Newton Foote rarely gets the credit she’s due. The American scientist, who was born exactly 200 years ago on Wednesday, was the first woman in climate science. It was back in 1856 that Foote theorized that changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could affect the Earth’s temperature. She broke scientific ground that remains more relevant than ever in 2019, but history overlooked her until just a few years ago.

Foote arrived at her breakthrough idea through experimentation. With an air pump, two glass cylinders, and four thermometers, she tested the impact of “carbonic acid gas” (the term for carbon dioxide in her day) against “common air.” When placed in the sun, she found that the cylinder with carbon dioxide trapped more heat and stayed hot longer.

From a simple experiment, she drew a profound conclusion: “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature…must have necessarily resulted.” In other words, she connected the dots between carbon dioxide and global warming.

Foote’s paper, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays,” was presented in August 1856 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and then published. (For unknown reasons, likely rules or social norms, it was read by a man from The Smithsonian, rather than Foote herself.) That was three years before Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own, more detailed work on heat-trapping gases — work typically credited as the foundation of climate science.

Eunice Foote's Pioneering Research On CO2 And Climate Warming

The American journal of science.

 

[lpetrich]

This Suffrage-Supporting Scientist Defined the Greenhouse Effect But Didn’t Get the Credit, Because Sexism | Science | Smithsonian Magazine

The morning of August 23, 1856, saw hundreds of men of science, inventors and curious persons gathered in Albany, New York, for the Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest attended to date. The annual meetings of the AAAS brought together scientists from around the United States to share groundbreaking new discoveries, discuss advancements in their fields and explore new areas of investigation. Yet this particular meeting failed to deliver any papers of quality—with one notable exception.

That exception was a paper entitled “Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays,” by Eunice Foote. In two brisk pages, Foote’s paper anticipated the revolution in climate science by experimentally demonstrating the effects of the sun on certain gases and theorizing how those gases would interact with Earth’s atmosphere for the first time. In a column of the September 1856 issue of Scientific American titled “Scientific Ladies,” Foote is praised for supporting her opinions with “practical experiments.” The writers noted: “this we are happy to say has been done by a lady.”

Foote’s paper demonstrated the interactions of the sun’s rays on different gases through a series of experiments using an air pump, four thermometers, and two glass cylinders. First, Foote placed two thermometers in each cylinder and, using the air pump, removed the air from one cylinder and condensed it in the other. Allowing both cylinders to reach the same temperature, she then placed the cylinders with their thermometers in the sun to measure temperature variance once heated and under various states of moisture. She repeated this process with hydrogen, common air and CO2, all heated after being exposed to the sun.

Looking back on Earth’s history, Foote explains that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature ... at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted.” Of the gases tested, she concluded that carbonic acid trapped the most heat, having a final temperature of 125 °F. Foote was years ahead of her time. What she described and theorized was the gradual warming of the Earth’s atmosphere—what today we call the greenhouse effect.

 

[lpetrich]

John Tyndall: founder of climate science? | Climate Lab Book

... In his experiments, Tyndall demonstrated the ability of many individual gases to absorb heat, though the only one he specified in his report and lecture summary was coal gas. But he concluded: ‘Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat; but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet’. Tyndall had demonstrated and explained the physical basis of what we now call the greenhouse effect. He was keen to establish his priority, and published reports in continental journals, including Cosmos, Il Nuovo Cimento, and the Bibliothèque Universelle. It was only in the last of those that he specifically mentioned his discovery of the absorption of heat by water vapour and carbon dioxide.

...
It was immediately apparent to Tyndall that the absorption and emission of heat by water vapour could explain differences between air temperatures at midday and evening, or the temperature at the top of a mountain compared to the bottom. But he also claimed directly that changes in the amount of water vapour, carbon dioxide, or hydrocarbons, all of which absorbed heat, could have climatic effects. He wrote: ‘if, as the above experiments indicate, the chief influence be exercised by aqueous vapour, every variation of this constituent must produce a change of climate. Similar remarks would apply to the carbonic acid [carbon dioxide] diffused through the air’.

Though there was public discussion in the latter part of the nineteenth century about implications for the climate of burning huge quantities of coal, it was not until 1896 that the actual warming effect of carbon dioxide was estimated, by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius. And it was not until 1938 that Guy Callendar made the quantitative connection between global warming and emission of the gas through human activity.

Though John Tyndall himself never addressed that issue.

Global temperatures: 75 years after Callendar | Climate Lab Book

Then, 75 years ago, in February 1938, a little appreciated scientist, Guy Stewart Callendar, presented the first evidence that the planet had recently warmed. Callendar also suggested that changes in atmospheric CO2 had caused a large part of this observed warming. A new paper reanalyses Callendar’s work to mark the 75th anniversary of his landmark study.

What is 'hepeating?' - Business Insider - "Many women may be familiar with their own ideas being repeated by men in meetings."

 

[lpetrich]

On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground - Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

Arrhenius’s paper is the first to quantify the contribution of carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect (Sections I-IV) and to speculate about whether variations in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide have contributed to long-term variations in climate (Section V). Throughout this paper, Arrhenius refers to carbon dioxide as “carbonic acid” in accordance with the convention at the time he was writing.

Contrary to some misunderstandings, Arrhenius does not explicitly suggest in this paper that the burning of fossil fuels will cause global warming, though it is clear that he is aware that fossil fuels are a potentially significant source of carbon dioxide (page 270), and he does explicitly suggest this outcome in later work.

I spent some time perusing scholar.google.com for early greenhouse-effect work, and I found

XLI. The Greenhouse theory and planetary temperatures: The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science: Vol 16, No 93 - 1908

LXXIV. Radiative equilibrium: the insolation of an atmosphere: The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science: Vol 44, No 263 - 1922

The influence of the atmospheric constituents upon climate - Aldrich - 1927 - Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union - Wiley Online Library - 1927

 

[lpetrich]

I then turned to Venus, and I found these papers from 1940:

Note on the Surface Temperature of Venus. by Rupert Wildt, 1940

On the Possible Existence of Formaldehyde in the Atmosphere of Venus. by Rupert Wildt, 1940

A lot of hand waving, it must be conceded, but that was long before the first spacecraft were sent to that planet.

In 1956, some radio astronomers found that Venus has an apparent temperature in radio frequencies of around 600 K or 300 C - Observations of Venus at 3.15-CM Wave Length.

A young astronomer named Carl Sagan got to work on what might be causing it, and he proposed a greenhouse effect. The Surface Temperature of Venus. - NASA/ADS by Carl Sagan in 1960.

When US Mariner 2 flew by Venus in 1962, the first successful flyby of another planet, it made closeup radio observations, giving a temperature of 500 K or 200 C.

Soviet Venera 4 entered Venus's atmosphere in 1967 and parachuted down through it. It radioed back that Venus's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, and its last temperature reading was 535 K / 262 C. A day later, US Mariner 5 flew by. From its radio broadcasts going through Venus's atmosphere, it was deduced that Venus's surface temperature is 800 K / 500 C with a pressure of 75 - 100 bar. Venera 4 stopped transmitting on the way down.

Venera 7 reached the planet's surface in 1970, radioing back a temperature of 748 K / 475 C and a pressure of 90 bar. These results were confirmed by later spacecraft to land there.

Greenhouse models of Venus' High surface temperature, as constrained by Pioneer Venus measurements - Pollack - 2012 - Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics - Wiley Online Library - from 1980

We find that the observed surface temperature and lapse rate structure of the lower atmosphere can be reproduced quite closely with a greenhouse model that contains the water vapor abundance reported by the Venera spectrophotometer experiment. Thus the greenhouse effect can account for essentially all of Venus' high surface temperature.

 

[repoman]

Tyndall had a report of his own published between pages 143-146 of that same volume. It is not included in the link, maybe it is lost.

So, some more increased chance he had read it (proofreading after the fact etc...) or at the very least had a colleague read it and also read Foote's report and then described it to him.