{"id":7266,"date":"2018-06-26T05:13:03","date_gmt":"2018-06-26T05:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7266"},"modified":"2018-06-26T05:13:03","modified_gmt":"2018-06-26T05:13:03","slug":"remembering-eunice-foote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2018\/06\/26\/remembering-eunice-foote\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Eunice Foote"},"content":{"rendered":"

An email last week from\u00a0David Terry, editor of the valuable BEACONS Guides<\/a> to Climate Change in which he\u00a0discusses<\/a> the sadly little known Eunice Foote, who was\u00a0the first to discover greenhouse gases.<\/p>\n

The book<\/a> that Paul Vare and I wrote recently: The World We'll Leave Behind: Grasping the Sustainability Challenge, features Foote's work in Chapter 27 on The Greenhouse Effect<\/em>. \u00a0We finish the chapter in this way:<\/p>\n

The greenhouse effect was discovered in 1856 by the American scientist Eunice Foote.[i]<\/a>\u00a0 She showed that gases in the atmosphere were affected by the Sun\u2019s radiation in different ways, and of all the gases she tested, it was CO2 <\/sub>that trapped the most heat.\u00a0 In 1859, UK physicist John Tyndall independently demonstrated the same effects, and he usually gets the credit for making the link.\u00a0 This was because he published his results, including data on how the absorption of radiant heat differed from gas to gas.\u00a0 Foote was ahead of her time.\u00a0 Although her work was not published, and she wasn\u2019t even allowed to present her findings to fellow scientists as no woman could do that in the USA at the time, it\u2019s reported that she also speculated about whether changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the air might lead to a warming of the Earth.\u00a0 Rather inevitably, only one of these two scientists has a University Climate Change research centre named after them.[ii]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[i]<\/a> For details of the work of Eunice Foote go to: ow.ly\/IvRF308QuEp<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> The University of East Anglia\u2019s Tyndall Centre is named after John Tyndall: www.tyndall.ac.uk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An email last week from\u00a0David Terry, editor of the valuable BEACONS Guides to Climate Change in which he\u00a0discusses the sadly little known Eunice Foote, who was\u00a0the first to discover greenhouse gases. The book that Paul Vare and I wrote recently:...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}