"the laws of gravity and it's relationship to mass and distance are well defined"
So is the absorption of heat by CO2, CH4, etc. That happened 50 years before Arrhenius.
In July 1859, the Irish physicist John Tyndall, one of the great scientists of the 19th century, established that certain atmospheric gases absorb heat quite strongly. This innocuous-sounding discovery was established over a few short weeks, but it provided the solution to one of the great riddles of science: the famous ‘greenhouse effect’.
The greenhouse effect was first proposed by the French polymath Joseph Fourier, almost a century before Tyndall’s experiments. Fourier had wondered how the earth maintains its warm temperature, and he speculated that while heat from the sun passes easily through our atmosphere on the way to earth, heat radiated outwards by the warm earth must somehow be trapped in the atmosphere. The hypothesis was highly controversial, as it was widely assumed that gases are transparent to heat.
Tyndall, a fierce proponent of the new experimental method of science, devised a series of simple experiments to test Fourier’s hypothesis. Working in the dusty basement of the Royal Institution in London in the summer of 1859, he soon established that, while most gases are indeed transparent to light and heat, some gases – carbon dioxide and water vapour in particular – can absorb heat energy at certain wavelengths. As traces of each gas were known to exist in the earth’s atmosphere, the puzzle of the earth’s temperature was solved.
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