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Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (/ ˈ f ʊr i eɪ,-i ər /; [1] French: [ʒɑ̃ batist ʒozɛf fuʁje]; 21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830) was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre, Burgundy and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and ...
From ancient times, people suspected that the climate of a region could change over the course of centuries. For example, Theophrastus, a pupil of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC, told how the draining of marshes had made a particular locality more susceptible to freezing, and speculated that lands became warmer when the clearing of forests exposed them to sunlight.
The greenhouse effect occurs when greenhouse gases in a planet's atmosphere insulate the planet from losing heat to space, raising its surface temperature. Surface heating can happen from an internal heat source (as in the case of Jupiter ) or come from an external source, such as its host star .
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
Eunice Newton Foote (July 17, 1819 – September 30, 1888) was an American scientist, inventor, and women's rights campaigner.She was the first scientist to confirm that certain gases warm when exposed to sunlight, and that therefore rising carbon dioxide (CO 2) levels could increase atmospheric temperature and affect climate, a phenomenon now referred to as the greenhouse effect.
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
John Tyndall (/ ˈ t ɪ n d əl /; 2 August 1820 – 4 December 1893) was an Irish physicist.His scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism.Later he made discoveries in the realms of infrared radiation and the physical properties of air, proving the connection between atmospheric CO 2 and what is now known as the greenhouse effect in 1859.
Earth constantly absorbs energy from sunlight and emits thermal radiation as infrared light. In the long run, Earth radiates the same amount of energy per second as it absorbs, because the amount of thermal radiation emitted depends upon temperature: If Earth absorbs more energy per second than it radiates, Earth heats up and the thermal radiation will increase, until balance is restored; if ...