What to Know About Legendary Climate Scientist and Suffragette, Eunice Newton Foote

Many tend to think of climate science as a new study, but it's evidently been in the works for over 100 years. In fact, one scientist in particular had warned us of the detrimental affects of global warming as early as the 1800s. Her name was Eunice Newton Foote, and she has been largely overlooked in climate science history, despite all of her incredible achievements and groundbreaking discoveries. She may have been the first to warn others about global warming, and was a suffragette.

"Despite her remarkable insight into the influence that higher carbon dioxide levels in the past would have had on Earth’s temperature, Foote went unnoticed in the history of climate science until recently," Climate.gov wrote in 2019, in honor of what would have been her 200th birthday.

Foote is definitely a name you'll want to remember, in the realm of environmental science and climate activism.

Eunice Newton Foote was born in 1819, according to Chemistry World, to a family of farmers. She grew up in Upstate New York and attended school at the Troy Female Seminary, which offered the most extensive science program of any U.S. girls schools. Foote pursued science, and wrote a paper in 1856 called On The Heat and the Sun's Rays. The paper explains how CO2 in the atmosphere has warmed the atmosphere, which predated John Tyndall's climate change hypothesis by three years.

The paper was presented at 10th annual American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Albany, though it was likely read by someone else, as women couldn't present their own work at the time. To support her work, she tested the effects of sunlight on air and gas samples, and basically discovered the greenhouse effect. Although Horace-Bénédict de Saussure technically discovered it in 1770, she compared how different temperatures affected moist and dry air, CO2, hydrogen, and oxygen.

Foote found that carbon affected the sun's rays and temperatures most.

"The highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas," she wrote, per Chemistry World. "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."

In addition to Foote's 1856 paper on global warming, additional climate studies, and patents for various inventions, she was also key in the suffrage movement. Per Smithsonian Mag, she sadly didn't gain notoriety for her studies as John Tydall did, for making the same discoveries three years later. As previously mentioned, she also couldn't present her own paper at AAAS, and her paper wasn't included in the society's yearly Proceedings, which recorded all papers presented at the meeting.

Despite all of these irritating setbacks, though, Foote persisted, and hoped to change things for women for years to come. Judith Wellman's The Road to Seneca Falls recorded Foote as one of the first five people to sign the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention Declaration of Sentiments. She had also been elected to prepare the Convention proceedings in tandem with the famous Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who is a known writer, speaker, and philosopher from the woman's rights and suffrage movements.

With that in mind, there were probably many other women, and other scientists from marginalized communities, that made similarly remarkable discoveries of the like — without receiving the notoriety they truly deserved.