New Scientist offers a history lesson:

As an antidote to this year’s Darwin-mania, we celebrate a piece of science from 1859 that wasn’t remotely controversial at the time, but which underpins the hottest political potato of our era: climate change. In May 1859, six months before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Irish physicist John Tyndall proved that some gases have a remarkable capacity to hang onto heat, so demonstrating the physical basis of the greenhouse effect. Charles Darwin had journeyed round the world and ruminated for 20 years before presenting his inflammatory ideas on evolution. Tyndall spent just a few weeks experimenting in a windowless basement lab in London.