No 'eureka moment': The evolution of climate science

In 1958, an American television show, 'The Bell Telephone Science Hour', said C02 from factories and cars could be warming Earth's climate. Photo: AFP

What if Earth's atmosphere was infused with extra carbon dioxide, mused amateur scientist Eunice Foote in an 1856 research paper that concluded the gas was very good at absorbing heat.

"An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature," she wrote in the study, published in the American Journal of Science and Arts and then swiftly forgotten.