170 Years Ago, She Saw This Coming

My husband and I were so happy to finally be able to sit outside on our screened-in porch over the weekend. It wasn’t too scorchingly hot. Not like today in Washington, D.C. There was even a moment Saturday when we felt a slight breeze, which we were grateful for. Record temperatures and violent late-afternoon thunderstorms on the daily make it feel like something is happening. Something that we should be paying attention to.

Someone saw this coming, but I bet you’ve never heard her name before.

On August 23, 1856, in Albany, New York, scientists and dignitaries gathered for the eighth annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest annual gathering of scientists at the time.

A woman named Eunice Foote was in the audience, listening patiently and, if I had to guess, grinding her teeth. At the podium was Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian, reading her paper to the crowd. She wasn’t even allowed to present her own work - because of her gender.

Eunice was one of 11 children. She was born Eunice Newton on July 17, 1819, in Goshen, Connecticut, to Thirza Newton and Isaac Newton, a farmer and entrepreneur - yes, they were distantly related to that Isaac Newton. She must have gotten some of her smarts from him. She grew up in New York, then the epicenter of social movements including abolition and women’s suffrage. At 15, she spent a year at the Troy Female Seminary, the only school in the U.S. at the time offering girls a real scientific curriculum, including its own chemistry lab, where she studied scientific theory, foundational chemistry, and biology. Female students there were taught they should be “the companions, not the satellites of men” - a radical idea for the time.

She was also fascinated by geological evidence piling up around her showing that the Earth’s climate had once been very different. Fossils found in rock layers suggested tropical conditions in places that were now temperate, and no one had a good explanation for why the climate might have changed so dramatically over millions of years. It’s likely what drew her to experiments on solar heat and atmospheric gases. But we know little about Eunice herself because she did not keep a diary and no letters have surfaced. This happens a lot in my research, so consider it a gentle reminder to keep a journal.

Her paper, read aloud by someone else that day in Albany, turned out to be the most interesting of the entire conference. One account called it the “one notable exception” to the generally dull gathering. No wonder – Eunice had uncovered something big. Using glass cylinders, an air pump, thermometers, and direct sunlight, she tested moist air, dry air, and CO2, and found that CO2 trapped and retained the most heat. Her conclusion, in her own words: an atmosphere higher in CO2 would give to our Earth a higher temperature. That’s a mic drop moment.

Eunice, an amateur scientist, was the first person to discover what we now call the greenhouse effect - the mechanism driving modern climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 10 warmest years in the historical record have all occurred in the past decade, between 2015 and 2024. And 2024 was the warmest year since global records began in 1850 by a huge margin. We should be worried, and we should be thankful to Eunice for the early warning - even if few people acknowledged it.

Adding insult to injury, when her paper was published, the editors added this condescending note: “This we are happy to say has been done by a lady.” When Joseph Henry read her paper for her, he opened with the line, “Science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true.” A backhanded compliment, maybe.

The following year she did present her own work, a paper on static electricity, at the 1857 AAAS’s meeting in Montreal - so she didn’t leave the field of science altogether, even though no one would have blamed her if she had. It was her last known publication. She must have been dispirited. Her silence speaks for itself.

Henry may have read her findings aloud, but he downplayed their significance. Three years later, a man named John Tyndall, who was a much better connected European scientist, published similar findings and was credited as the field’s founder for the next 150 years. He did not cite Eunice in is his paper. Surprised? I’m not. She wouldn’t have been surprised by the injustice either – she would have been used to it by then. She was angry about women’s diminutive place in American society.

She and her husband, Elisha, had signed the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls, where they lived. The 1848 document was the first formal list of political, economic, and social grievances demanding equal rights for women. It was modeled on the Declaration of Independence, framing women’s rights as human rights. Eunice was the fifth person to sign the bold statement that went so far as to demand votes for women (gasp).

For decades she was lost to history. No authenticated portrait or photograph of her is even known to exist. The image circulating online is a generic Victorian-era photo that’s been mislabeled as her.

It wasn’t until 2011 when a retired petroleum geologist from Oklahoma named Ray Sorenson, stumbled on her paper. Since then, historians have worked to restore her place in climate science history. Elizabeth Wagner Reed first wrote about Eunice’s contribution in her 1992 book American Women in Science Before the Civil War. Another historian named John Perlin at U.C. Santa Barbara is doing more research on her. It’s important to recognize these writers and historians who are cultural archaeologists of a sort, digging up the past to give credit where it’s long overdue.

Oh, and that cylinder Eunice measured in her parlor: We’re living inside it.