165 years ago, a woman warned us about climate change. Of course, it has been ignored.

For decades, Eunice Newton Foote's 1856 study foretold how society would address both climate change and women. The Kyoto Protocol, the first kind of, sort of, maybe worldwide action on climate change, didn't happen until 140 years later.

Humans have been warned about the dangers of climate change for the future of the planet and life as we know it since the 1800s. During the American Industrial Revolution in the 1850s, a woman called Eunice Newton Foote was one of the first scientists to raise the alarm. Let's just say her findings foretold how society would approach both climate change and discerning women for decades to come.

Foote was denied the opportunity to present her own study at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual conference in 1856. No, that was accomplished by Joseph Henry, the Smithsonian Institution's first secretary. According to Climate.gov, her findings received barely a page and a half in the American Journal of Science and Arts in November 1856, and a brief description in the Annual of Scientific Discovery the following year.

"Despite her amazing insight into the effect that higher carbon dioxide levels in the past would have had on Earth's temperature," Climate.gov said in 2019 to commemorate Foote's 200th birthday.

So, what was the purpose of Foote's experiment? And why did she do it in the first place?

Foote became concerned about the quantity of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere during the American industrial revolution, when industries and railways were springing up and more coal was being used to power steam engines, according to NBCLX Storyteller Chase Cain. She decided to grab a few glass tubes and fill them with a thermometer and several sorts of gas. She exposed them to the sun and discovered that the one with wet air heated up faster than the one with dry air, and the one with carbon dioxide heated up faster than the others.

"An atmosphere of that gas [carbon dioxide] would give our Earth a high temperature," she wrote.

 She was, of course, correct. The average temperature of the Earth has risen by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 140 years. It may not seem like much, but climate experts think that 2.7 degrees of warming is doable. So, despite Foote's — and others' — best efforts, we're coming fairly close.

Sean Sublette, a meteorologist with Climate Central, told Chase, "That will be with us for generations to come because there's no real way to reverse this." "There is no simple solution to chill the world."

After Foote, a Ford physicist penned a story for Time magazine in 1953, a co-inventor of the atomic bomb in 1959, President Lyndon Johnson's scientists in 1965, and a NASA scientist told Congress in 1988 that climate change was 99 percent certain to be caused by people.

Foote was, however, one of the earliest and most influential climate scientists to speak out. If only we had paid attention.