John Tyndall on the Greenhouse Effect, 1859
John Tyndall John Tyndall is often credited with discovering the Greenhouse Effect. That's not quite true, since Eunice Foote's paper was published before Tyndall's. However, this quote from Tyndall's paper is remarkable. Not only did he understand that greenhouse gases trapped heat, he understood that it was the heat radiating from the planet that was trapped, not the solar energy entering the climate system. Here's an excerpt from John Tyndall's 1859 paper entitled, "On the Transmission of Heat of different qualities through Gases of different kinds." The bearing of this experiment upon the action of planetary atmospheres is obvious. The solar heat possesses, in a far higher degree than that of the lime light, the power of crossing an atmosphere; but, and when the heat is absorbed by the planet, it is so changed in quality that the rays emanating from the planet cannot get with the same freedom back into space. Thus the atmosphere admits of the entra...