The grandma of climate science

Last week's Inside Science dealt with the digitization programme that after nearly ten years has yielded a website that makes available online all the journals and many other associated documents from the archives of the Royal Society, dating back to its earliest activities over 350 years ago

Established in 2014, 'Science in the making' is an ambitious digitisation programme that aims to make archival material related to the publication of the Society’s scientific journals available online to all. On this website you can discover the complex material that lies behind the published articles: peer reviews, correspondence, photographs, illustrations and early drafts.

Source

This clearly deserves a Tezzy nomination (regular readers will recognize this as a virtual [that is, non-existent, except in my fevered brain] award for a time-wasting website [numerosissimi...

<rantette> 

Incidentally, why can't people stress these Italianate superlatives as nature intended, that is (ahem) proparoxytonically (on the third from last syllable). There was, until the pandemic put them out of business, a short-lived beauty parlour in Spencers Wood with the (odious, incidentally) name "Blissimi".

<autobiographical-note> 

I remember when they were recruiting before the launch. They asked for full cv, references, AND A PHOTOGRAPH. They might just as well have said

Ugly people need not apply. 

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They clearly didn't exclude the ugly in spirit, who said they worked at "Blissimi".
</rantette>

 ...]).But it was not until 1945 that the Royal Society admitted women as full members (there had previously been some sort of Associate Fellowship). I suppose it took the 2nd World War to convince the members that women were capable of more than housework and child-rearing

Nearly a month ago I missed an edition of the BBC's excellent The Climate Question. As it says in the blurb:

In 1856, an American woman called Eunice Newton Foote discovered that higher levels of carbon dioxide would warm the planet. But credit for discovering climate change was given to someone else who made the same discovery three years later.

We celebrate Foote's role in early climate science by recreating her little-known experiment and asking if there are some voices that continue to be overlooked in climate science today - and how we overcome these climate blind spots.

Three years later, John Tyndall (who had the advantage of a Y chromosome rather than a second X, as well as being a Fellow of the Royal Society) did a similar experiment, and was subsequently dubbed 'The father of climate science.'

The first contributor to this podcast, Alice Bell, describes Eunice's experiment in her book Our Biggest Experiment:

Her experiment was reasonably simple. She placed two glass cylinders by a window and planted a thermometer in each of them. Using a pump to remove some of the air from one of the cylinders, she found it didn't catch the heat as well as the other. From this, she figured out the density of the air had an impact on the power of the Sun's rays. This made sense - after all, everyone knew it was colder at the top of high mountains. After comparing a cylinder of moist air with one that had been dried, she found the Sun's rays were more powerful in damper conditions. This wasn't surprising either, as she commented in her notes:

'Who has not experienced the burning heat of the Sun that precedes a summer's shower?' Thirdly, and crucially for our story, she tried filling one cylinder with carbon dioxide. This had the biggest impact: the cylinder became noticeably much hotter and took a lot longer to cool down after the experiment had ended. She concluded, almost in passing: 'An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature.'

'WOULD give.'  167 years ago. But the Monstrous Regiment of XY-ers careered on in their self-perpetuating death spiral. As Byron put it 'And if I laugh 'tis that I may not weep' (Don Juan quotes Best Before May 1970).

Perhaps Eunice should be dubbed 'the grandma of climate science'. 

That's all for now.

b

PS

I would have preferred to illustrate this post with a photo of Eunice Newton Foote. Tellingly, though, there isn't one. The only photographs of American women in the 19th century were of the "Get back in the wagon, woman" sort, with their husband's hand on their right shoulder and their left hand on the right shoulder of the oldest of a befuddling string of children. I'll have to content myself with not using a photo of Tyndall.

Update: 2023.06.09.14:15 – Added PPS

PPS Come to think of it, the snub is a bit more snubby if I use this picture:

Alice Bell