Sixty seven years ago, on this day, February 9, 1956 scientist Hans Seuss (cosmic rays) wrote to his colleague Roger Revelle (marine science, among other things)
“I am not too happy about the whole thing” –
Weart, 1997, p 346, footnote 78
The thing he wasn’t happy about was being able to account for Gilbert Plass’s point about the build-up of atmospheric CO2…
Further context here, via an excellent 1990 book by Michael Oppenheimer and Robert Boyle, called “Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect” (a race we have clearly lost, btw).
“According to Gordon MacDonald of the Mitre Corporation, who spent some time at Scripps during the 1950s, the Revelle-Suess collaboration on the CO2 question was fortuitous, for neither was studying climate. Suess was interested in the cosmic rays that produce the carbon-14 isotope in the atmosphere. Revelle was an expert in marine sediments, which were the presumed graveyard for carbon removed from the air by the ocean. Suess and others had noted a small decline in the carbon-14 content of new tree rings versus ones that were fifty years older, indicating that the carbon dioxide taken in by plants in recent years was deficient in carbon14 compared to earlier times. Fossil fuels are lacking in carbon-14 because it disintegrates by radioactivity over the eons of burial. The two scientists proposed that fossil-fuel combustion had gradually diluted the carbon-14 that is produced continually by cosmic rays, by adding the dominant carbon-12 to the atmosphere. In other words, emissions had not been removed completely and immediately by the ocean. From this and other data they surmised that carbon-dioxide levels would grow significantly in the future and affect climate.”
Oppenheimer M. and Boyle, R . (1990) Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect. London I.B. Tauris, page 224
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
The scientists, Suess and Revelle were puzzling over what would become their seminal paper released in early 1957. That paper suggested that scientists had made an unsafe assumption, (based on Revelle’s 1930s work), that carbon dioxide would be absorbed by the ocean because the layers of the ocean mixed well.
This kind of dissatisfaction and puzzling is what scientists are paid to do. If they didn’t, we’d still have “earth and air and fire and water” as per the Aristotlean version of The Elements song by Tom Lehrer.
What I think we can learn from this
Smart people have been puzzling on this for a long time, and came up with some good answers that should have had us sit up and take notice. But at a societal species level, that is too much to ask, because everyone has so much else going on at any given time. And if they don’t, it is “given” to them via pay cuts and reality television.
What happened next
Suess and Revelle published their paper. Revelle hired David Keeling to measure CO2 accurately. Other people paid attention. And here we are 70 years down the line with atmospheric concentrations 100 PPM higher than they were at the time.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.
References
Weart, S. 1997. Global Warming, Cold War, and the Evolution of Research Plans. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences Vol. 27, No. 2 (1997), pp. 319-356