Exercise: For questions 1 to 5, listen to a recording about three pioneers who predicted climate
change and answer the questions. Write NO MORE THAN FIVE WORDS taken from the
recording for each answer in the corresponding questions provided.
1. What type of containers did she use to hold the gases for her experiment?
____________________________________________________________
2. Which other gas, besides CO₂, did Foote's experiment indicate has a significant heat-trapping
effect?
____________________________________________________________
3. Where was Foote’s work rediscovered after being overlooked for 150 years?
____________________________________________________________
4. What two factors were Keeling's colleagues investigating in relation to each other?
____________________________________________________________
5. What visual pattern on Keeling’s graph indicated the continuous rise of atmospheric CO₂ over
time?
____________________________________________________________
Answer key:
1. glass cylinders
2. water vapour
3. antique science annual
4. ocean acidity and carbon dioxide
5. ominously upward-curving line
We've known about the idea of the greenhouse effects since the 1820s, but it was Eunice
Foote - a women's rights activist - 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.
One was carbon dioxide, CO₂. "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 trap heat more than other gases do
and the potential effects on our climate began to emerge. "An atmosphere of that gas would give to
our Earth a high temperature."
That year she submitted her findings to an American scientific society. 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,
but it went largely unnoticed.
Three years later, Irish physicist John Tyndall did more complex experiments, 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. No pictures of Foote have survived, and her contribution remained buried for 150
years - only coming to light by chance in 2010, when a retired geologist discovered a citation of her
work in an antique science annual.
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 something as huge as the Earth's climate 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 were studying the relationship between ocean
acidity and carbon dioxide. Until then, it had been thought that the oceans quickly absorb most CO₂,
taking it out of the atmosphere, but that didn't appear to be true. 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 pretty badly screwed up.” Atmospheric CO₂ readings had been taken
for decades, but the data was unreliable.
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, 4,000 metres
above sea level, to the huge, active volcano of Mauna Loa, in Hawaii. “If you had to have picked a
spot anywhere, which would have given a representation of the whole world with one single site,
Mauna Loa Observatory is probably about the best choice.”
His new data proved two things. 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. It was only through sheer perseverance that the observatory kept taking its readings.
Keeling was eventually awarded a National Medal of Science for his work, and today, Mauna Loa is
still the world's benchmark site for measuring CO₂.
It's now more than 160 years 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 CO₂ was rising at an alarming rate.
And here we are…
Sources: three pioneers who predicted climate change
