Discussion
Eunice Newton-Foote “died in 1888 and for almost 100 years her contributions were unknown, before being rediscovered by women academics in the twentieth century.
In the 21st C, new interest in Foote arose when it was realized that her work [published in 1856] predated discoveries made by John Tyndall [published in 1859], who had been recognized by scientists as the first person to experimentally show the mechanism of the greenhouse effect involving infrared radiation.”
@urlyman Ah, but a woman was not "a person" and in some circumstances still isn't.
…There is a Tyndall Institute in the UK but, as far as I am aware, no Newton-Foote Institute.
Good tracing of the history here https://spie.org/news/photonics-focus/marapr-2020/tyndall-foote-and-the-greenhouse-effect
…Noting that Eunice Newton-Foote and her husband, Elisha Foote, settled in Seneca Falls, NY.
Both were “early signers of a pioneering statement of women's rights in 1848”.
What has happened since Eunice’s discovery of the ‘greenhouse effect’ seems likely to trace a Seneca Effect.
One might say the effect of ignoring her insight will be a Seneca Fall
…“studies of past CO2 levels have accumulated evidence of CO2 levels being lower than 400 ppm for the past 23 million years.
That makes the CO2 records on this page the highest in human history plus a period that’s a hundred times the 200,000* years that homo sapiens have graced the earth.”
https://www.co2.earth/co2-records
(*or ~75x if we go with 300,000. Either way, an incomprehensibly long time.)
…“But the current elevation of CO2 levels is just one side of the problem..
The other is the speed of the changes in atmospheric composition—more than a hundred times the speed of change before the Industrial Revolution.
Living species and ecosystems adapt to change, but fewer can endure when the speed of change is too fast.”
We’re going too fast
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
