Among others, the French artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) also chronicled the metamorphosis from the pastoral scene to the industrial workplace. In his 1802 painting The Ironworks, Coalbrook Dale by Night, the fiery night scene of the ore smelting works appears as frightening as a Halloween cauldron.

Meanwhile, scientists were also observing atmospheric changes and weather deviations, and the exhibition follows these findings as well. In 1833, British chemist and meteorologist Luke Howard (1772–1864) published his 700-page study, The Climate of London. His examination of a decade’s worth of daily temperature readings, water levels, rainfall and wind direction in London led him to conclude the existence of what he called an urban “heat island” effect. The accompanying exhibit label explains the process behind Howard’s findings: “Because buildings, roads, and other urban infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat, cities tend to be several degrees warmer than less developed areas with trees and bodies of water.” Howard also noted that such temperature changes coincided with a phenomenon he called “city fog”—what we now call smog or air pollution.

“Reverence for Nature”

The exhibition also highlights the pioneering environmental work of the lesser-known US scholar, inventor and women’s rights advocate Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888), whose 1856 publication Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays in The American Journal of Science and Arts, demonstrated that carbon dioxide (CO2) trapped heat, a climate-changing process it called trapping the heat. effect. Hers was the first experiment on record showing the impact of CO2 emissions on what we now call climate change. But Foote’s research has been largely overlooked. Instead, the British physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) received credit for the discovery in a study published three years later. It remains unclear whether Tyndall was familiar with Foote’s work.

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Writers such as the American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) had also begun to collect their own measurements of changing river depths and detailed notes of blooms and bird appearances near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived.

But it has only become apparent in recent decades how essential his observations can serve as points of comparison between then and now. Be exposed, for example, to Thoreau’s methodical charting of temperatures through the seasons at Walden Pond. More recently, climate change biologist Richard Primack detailed in his book: Walden heatingthe many flowers that now bloom earlier today than in Thoreau’s time because of rising temperatures.

While Thoreau’s data today is used mostly for comparative purposes, the author himself expressed alarm about the damage caused by human intervention, says Karla Nielsen, the exhibit’s curator and the Huntington’s chief curator of literary collections. On her walks, “He would notice that the course of the Merrimack had been changed because of the factories on the river,” she tells the BBC, as the dams built in connection with the mills disrupted the natural, seasonal flow of the water.