Sixty nine years ago, on this day, February 8th, 1956, US scientist Roger Revelle was giving TESTIMONY BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, FEBRUARY 8, 1956
You can read it here.
Fossil fuels and Carbon dioxide
Dr. REVELLE. . . . There is still one more aspect of the oceanographic program which I thought you gentlemen would be interested in. This is a combination of meteorology and oceanography.
Right now and during the past 50 years, we are burning, as you know, quite a bit of coal and oil and natural gas. The rate at which we are burning this is increasing very rapidly.
This burning of these fuels which were accumulated in the earth over hundreds of millions of years, and which we are burning up in a few generations, is producing tremendous quantities of carbon dioxide in the air. Based on figures given out by the United Nations, I would estimate that by the year 2010, we will have added something like 70 percent of the present atmospheric carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This is an enormous quantity. It is like 1,700 billion tons. Now, nobody knows what this will do. Lots of people have supposed that it might actually cause a warming up of the atmospheric temperature and it may, in fact, cause a remarkable change in climate. . . .
Warming of the earth
We may actually, for example, find that the Arctic Ocean will become navigable and the coasts become a place where people can live, then the Russian Arctic coastline will be really quite free for shipping, as will our Alaskan coastline, if this possible increase in temperature really happens.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2025 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that big science cost big money, and Revelle was trying to assure Congressmen that this was money well spent. And so came up with various stories and scenarios.
What I think we can learn from this is that scientists have to know how to keep the money flowing. This is a perennial problem in the area of big science, but using the word big like that has a pejorative implication, doesn’t it? We’re no longer in the era of people tinkering in their sheds, much as we like to hark back to that with the folk Story of Google.
What happened next … the International Geophysical Year.