Everyone's aware by now that it's apparently fallen to a 16-year-old girl to call us to action on climate change.  But did you know that it was a woman who first demonstrated the warming power of carbon dioxide?  

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist, inventor, and women’s rights campaigner, presented the results of her experiments at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Albany.

To test whether carbon dioxide would increase temperatures in the atmosphere, she used thermometers and two glass tubes — one rich in carbon dioxide, the other less so.  Both tubes were placed under the sun to see whether one might heat up more than the other. As it turns out, the one with more CO2 did.  The experiment became the foundational basis of the greenhouse effect and informs climate research to this day.

In keeping with the era’s limitations on women, Foote's findings had to be presented by a man at the Albany meeting,  But her work was published, and three years later it was replicated and advanced by the Irish scientist John Tyndall.

Last month, some 160 years after Foote's groundbreaking work, young Greta Thunberg sailed to New York to address the United Nations Climate Action Summit. The summit’s goal was to accelerate action to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement, which was negotiated in 2015, but as Thunberg explained on The Daily Show and elsewhere, the window for meeting those targets is closing fast. 

Writer Elizabeth Kolbert notes that no other issue has a wider gap between what’s politically acceptable and what’s scientifically necessary than that of climate change.  Thunberg began her crusade last year sitting outside the Swedish parliament building, in Stockholm, handing out flyers that read “I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.” 

In a July address to the French parliament, Thunberg put it this way: “Maybe you are simply not mature enough to tell it like it is, because even that burden you leave to us children. We become the bad guys who have to tell people these uncomfortable things, because no one else wants to, or dares to.”