![]() ![]() Yet their findings helped kick off broader scientific exploration of how the composition of gases in Earth’s atmosphere affects global temperatures. Foote faded into relative obscurity - partly because of her gender, partly because her measurements were less sensitive. Today Tyndall is widely credited with the discovery of how what are now called greenhouse gases heat the planet, earning him a prominent place in the history of climate science. Carbon dioxide and water vapor, he showed, absorb more heat than regular air does. He sent infrared radiation through a tube filled with gas and measured the resulting temperature changes. In 1859, John Tyndall used this apparatus to study how various gases trap heat. “As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface,” he wrote in 1862. He argued that such gases would trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere, much as panes of glass trap heat in a greenhouse, and thus modulate climate. With a set of pipes and devices to study the transmission of heat, he found that CO 2 gas, as well as water vapor, absorbed more heat than air alone. Three years later, working independently and apparently unaware of Foote’s discovery, Irish physicist John Tyndall showed the same basic idea in more detail. “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” she wrote in an 1856 paper summarizing her findings. The results prompted Foote to muse on the relationship between CO 2, the planet and heat. “We’re in a planetary crisis.”Įunice Newton Foote observed in 1856 that an atmosphere of CO 2 would heat the planet. “What’s happening to the planet is not routine,” says Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Only drastic cuts in carbon emissions, backed by collective global will, can make a significant difference. The emissions that people have been putting into the air for centuries - the emissions that made long-distance travel, economic growth and our material lives possible - have put us squarely on a warming trajectory. Today we know that climate change and its consequences are real, and we are responsible. Temperature change is the difference from the 1850–1900 average. Long-term climate datasets show that Earth’s average surface temperature (combined land and ocean) has increased by more than 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times. ![]() NOAA and NASA data were vertically aligned with it using a reference period of 1981–2010. HadCRUT5 data was set to a baseline of 1850–1900. Otwell Source: NASA, NOAA, Met Office Hadley Centre. Beginning in the 1960s, researchers began developing comprehensive computer models that now illuminate the severity of the changes ahead.Į. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began the detailed measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide that would prove how much carbon is pouring from human activities. The roots of understanding this climate emergency trace back more than a century and a half. Human-caused climate change helped fuel Australia’s devastating wildfires in late 2019 to early 2020. Volunteers douse a fire during back-burning operations near the town of Kulnura in New South Wales in December 2019. Rains are becoming more intense, and weather patterns are shifting. Drought is parching farmlands and the rivers that feed them. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, raising sea levels and flooding low-lying island nations and coastal cities. The pace of change is accelerating, and the consequences are everywhere. But it has already been enough to fundamentally transform how energy flows around the planet. ![]() The planet’s average surface temperature has risen by at least 1.1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels of 1850–1900 - because people are loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping gases produced during the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gas, and from cutting down forests.Ī little over 1 degree of warming may not sound like a lot. Within a week, an international group of scientists had analyzed this extreme heat and concluded it would have been virtually impossible without climate change caused by humans. On June 29 Lytton, a village in British Columbia, set an all-time heat record for Canada, at 121° Fahrenheit (49.6° Celsius) the next day, the village was incinerated by a wildfire. For several days in late June, cities such as Vancouver, Portland and Seattle baked in record temperatures that killed hundreds of people. Even in a world increasingly battered by weather extremes, the summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest stood out. ![]()
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