The first chapter of A Brief History of Climate Change includes a review of the processes of climate change, including the forces that nudge the climate to a warmer or cooler state, and the feedbacks that amplify those forces. An example of such a "force" is the greenhouse effect, and an example of such a "feedback" is the melting of ice and snow which reveals darker surfaces that absorb more solar energy, leading to more melting, and so on.
While doing some reading on these topics I encountered something new about the original discovery of the greenhouse effect. I had always thought it was the Irish physicist John Tyndall who made that discovery, but in fact it was a little known American scientist, Eunice Newton Foote. Foote conducted some experiments with gases and sunlight and in an article published in the America Journal of Science and Arts in 1856 she wrote: “An atmosphere of that gas [carbon dioxide] 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 from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted.”
John Tyndall's first work on greenhouse gases was published in 1859 and over the following several years he pushed our understanding a lot further than any contemporaries. He may (or may not) have known of the earlier work by Foote, but doesn't credit her prior discovery.
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