On this day, July 1st, 1957, the “International Geophysical Year” (actually 18 months!) began. Sponsored jointly by WMO and the International Council for Scientific Unions (ICSU), 30,000 scientists from more than 1000 research stations in sixty-six countries participated. (source – Page 22 Paterson, M (1996))
Why this matters.
People were already interested in carbon dioxide build-up, and it was with funding earmarked for the IGY that senior American scientist Roger Revelle was able to hire a young post-doc called Charles David Keeling to take absurdly accurate measurements of atmospheric C02. Within two years (by early 1960) Keeling had ended the debate about whether – as per Guy Callendar – C02 was in fact climbing.
And so a data set was born
What happened next?
The carbon dioxide. It kept climbing, because humans kept burning more and more fossil fuels. Some more than others. Like there was “no tomorrow.”
To read: Walter Sullivan Assault on the Unknown