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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 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 vibrations.
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 nature of this experiment, and Fourier's conclusion that gases in the atmosphere could not form a stable barrier like the glass panes, may have contributed to atmospheric warming later being known as the 'greenhouse' effect, despite the actual mechanism of atmospheric warming being different than that found in an actual greenhouse.
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 .
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.
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.
The idealized greenhouse model is based on the fact that certain gases in the Earth's atmosphere, including carbon dioxide and water vapour, are transparent to the high-frequency solar radiation, but are much more opaque to the lower frequency infrared radiation leaving Earth's surface.
A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet. [6] Additionally, the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (such as water vapor and methane) are high, and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) range from 28 °C (82.4 °F) in the tropics to 0 °C (32 °F) in the polar regions. [7]