Eunice Newton Foote: The scientist and women’s rights activist who planted seed of climate change awareness

Eunice Newton Foote is considered the first person to recognise significance of greenhouse gases in climate change

Google is today marking the birth anniversary of American scientist Eunice Newton Foote, who laid the foundation of climate change awareness as early as the mid-19^th century, as well as being an advocate for women’s rights at a time when they were widely shunned from the scientific community.

On what would have been her 204^th birthday, the search engine celebrated Foote as the first person to recognise the significance of greenhouse gases in climate change, saying she “planted the seed” of climate science more than one hundred years before it would start to emerge as a major discipline.

Born in 1819 in Connecticut, Foote attended the Troy Female Seminary in New York, a school that encouraged girl students to attend science lectures and participate in chemistry labs. By the time she was a teenager she had developed what would be a lifelong passion for science.

Her journey towards making her own groundbreaking contributions began in the early 1850s, when she became curious about the effect of sunlight on different gasses.

Experimenting with glass bell jars filled with different fumes, she discovered that the cylinder containing carbon dioxide experienced the most significant heating effect in the sun.

Predicting that an increase in carbon dioxide levels could lead to global warming, she found that certain gases such as CO2 had the ability to trap heat from the sun and increase the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere.

She became the first scientist to make the connection between rising CO2 levels and the warming of the atmosphere.

“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 from its own action, as well as from increased weight, must have necessarily resulted,” her paper noted.

After publishing her findings, she produced her second study on atmospheric static electricity, which she called "electrical excitation". She published it in the journal Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

These were the first two studies in physics ever published by a woman in the US.

Her paper, titled "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays," was presented by a male colleague due to the prevailing gender biases of the time in 1856. He introduced her paper by stating that: "Science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true."

Her findings ended up causing a stir among the scientific community and paved the way for wider discussions and experiments that uncovered what became known as the greenhouse gas effect.

In addition to her groundbreaking contributions to climate science, Foote was also a passionate advocate for women’s rights.

Joining forces with prominent activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony, they campaigned for women’s suffrage and equal rights.

She was the fifth signatory of the Declaration of Sentiments – a document that was signed by 68 women and 32 men to demand equality for women in social and legal status.

However, her scientific contributions were largely forgotten for many years and belatedly received the recognition she deserved in life after her death, when here observations were rediscovered in 2010.