The committee’s foresight is not surprising; the existence of the greenhouse effect had been known to science since the French physicist Joseph Fourier suggested in 1824 that the earth’s atmosphere was acting as an insulator, trapping heat that would otherwise escape. And in 1859, the Irish physicist John Tyndall carried out laboratory experiments that demonstrated the warming power of CO2, leading the Swedish physicist and Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius to predict that burning coal would warm the earth – which he saw as a potentially positive development.