Name: Three pioneers who predicted climate change | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-09-15T19:10:29.000Z
Duration: 4 min 48 s
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We've known about the idea of the greenhouse effect since the 1820s,

but it was Eunice Foote - a women's rights activist -

Adverbs of manner

who first showed how it could actually work.

In 1856, she used an air pump to fill glass cylinders with different gases

and then tested the effect of sunlight on them.

"The receiver containing the gas became itself much heated...

and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling..."

Foote's experiment suggested that CO2 and water vapour

and the potential effects on our climate began to emerge.

would give to our Earth a high temperature."

At their conference she wasn't able to take questions directly

because someone else presented her work for her

and it wasn't published in the proceedings of the society.

Another journal did end up publishing her paper,

Three years later, Irish physicist John Tyndall

finding other greenhouse gases that trap heat.

He went on to become one of the founding figures of climate science.

Nobody knows if he'd read Eunice Foote's paper,

but his own didn't mention her or her glass cylinders at all.

and her contribution remained buried for 150 years -

when a retired geologist discovered a citation of her work

Guy Stewart Callendar was a steam engineer by day

and an avid collector of climate data in his spare time.

By the 1930s, he was collecting temperature readings

from 147 weather stations around the world.

No-one had ever collated the data like this before,

and when he compared his temperature readings

to historic measurements of CO2, he discovered a clear pattern.

Callendar saw that not only was climate change happening,

it was at least partly down to the burning of fossil fuels.

In 1938, Callendar presented his findings to a scientific body

but the idea that we humans could influence

was still, for many, too hard to believe.

It wasn't until after the Second World War

that the effect of human activity on global warming -

the "Callendar Effect" - was proved right.

In 1958, chemist Charles Keeling's colleagues

Until then, it had been thought that the oceans quickly absorb most CO2,

Keeling had a hunch that scientists had been underestimating

how much of the gas was actually over our heads.

I was telling these people that the whole field was

Atmospheric CO2 readings had been taken for decades,

Keeling was convinced he could do better, and looked for a spot

that was as far as possible from the pollution of cities and industry.

He went to the middle of the North Pacific,

to the huge, active volcano of Mauna Loa, in Hawaii.

If you had to have picked a spot anywhere,

a representation of the whole world with one single site,

Mauna Loa Observatory is probably about the best choice.

Firstly, it showed that CO2 goes up and down with the seasons.

But if you zoom out from these "saw's teeth"

you can see the second thing that Keeling proved -

atmospheric CO2 was increasing year on year.

Keeling began plotting his readings on a graph,

and the ominously upward-curving line - the "Keeling Curve" - was born.

But the Mauna Loa project faced challenges.

Equipment broke down, and it struggled to secure funding.

that the observatory kept taking its readings.

a National Medal of Science for his work,

and today, Mauna Loa is still the world's benchmark site

since Eunice Foote suggested the cause of global warming,

more than 80 years since Guy Callendar demonstrated

the planet was warming because of human activity,

and more than 60 years since Charles Keeling showed