The famous 19th Century French mathematician, J B Fourier, is generally credited with discovering the Greenhouse Effect but he was only reporting the work of a great 18th Century Swiss earth scientist: Horace-Benedict de Saussure. The work of both these scientists has been neglected recently because they wrote in French which is no longer the lingua franca of the scientific world. Recently two new translations of Fourier's work have been made available on the web, by William Connolley and Raymond Pierrehumbert [2004b], but de Saussure's ideas never seem to have been translated into English.
I have translated what I believe are the relevant documents, and I am making my working files available on a new web site: http://sites.google.com/site/saussureproject/. This post has been created to receive any comments regarding the accuracy of the transcription and translation of the two documents: Chapter 35 of "Travels in the Alps" and de Saussure's letter to the Journal de Paris.
It is not intended that this post should be used for comments on the significance of de Saussure's work. I am planning an annotated version of the translation where I will give my views. However, I thought some people might be interested in what I have done so far, and I welcome any comment here.
Cheers, Alastair.
References:
Pierrehumbert 2004a: Warming the world. Nature 432 677.
Pierrehumbert 2004b: Translation of M´emoire sur les Temp´eratures du Globe Terrestre et
des Espaces Plan´etaires by J-B J. Fourier. Nature 432 (online supplementary material to
Pierrehumbert, 2004a)
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3 comments:
Thanks - I was not aware of de Saussure.
Greenhouse effect is the gradual warming of the air surrounding the earth as a result of heat being trapped by environmental pollution.
Cool web site, I hadn't noticed www.complexclimate.org earlier during my searches!
Continue the excellent work!
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