What we knew when about global warming

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was a very busy man. The French mathematician and physicist was, at various times, a baron, imprisoned for his political activities in the French Revolution, and a scientific adviser to Napoleon during his Egypt campaign. Best remembered today for his eponymous mathematical and physical theorems about vibrations and heat transfer, Fourier also found time to play a pivotal role in our understanding of the Earth’s climate. In 1822, Fourier’s quest for a universal theory of terrestrial temperatures culminated in his magnum opus, Théorie analytique de la chaleur. The core of the book expounded the relationship between the Earth as a cooling body, the Sun as the heat source, and the atmosphere, delightfully described as the “diaphanous” intermediary, slowing the rate of heat loss from the Earth’s surface to space.

Lesley Hughes.

Tangible evidence for the mechanism by which Fourier’s diaphanous intermediary might affect the Earth’s climate came decades later. The person traditionally credited with demonstrating the heat-trapping potential of different atmospheric gases was Irish physicist John Tyndall. A superb experimentalist, Tyndall devised a machine to measure the ability of different gases – nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane – to absorb radiant heat. He published his work in 1859.

Read the essay from The Monthly by Lesley Hughes -  “What we knew when about global warming.”