Tag: Hans Seuss

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Science Scientists

December 30, 1957 – a letter from Gilbert Plass to Guy Callendar

Seventy six years ago, on this day, December 30, 1957, the English steam engineer Guy Callendar wrote to the Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass

“Plass wrote to Callendar that Revelle and Suess and Arnold and Anderson had “attacked the carbon dioxide climatic theory ‘quite vigorously’ at a meeting earlier this year.”

They claimed that it was absolutely impossible to have had a sufficient increase in the CO2 amount in this century for the reasons that were given in their articles. I think you have pointed out several ways that their conclusion could be in error and I feel that there are still several possible explanations. 64 (Fleming 2007, p.81)

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2023 it is 421ppm, but check here for daily measures. 

The context was that American scientists who were studying carbon dioxide build-up and had been writing about it were still not quite sure what was going on. Understandably – if all the answers were obvious you wouldn’t need to explore anything, and that’s not how science works 

Guy Callendar had written the first serious “carbon dioxide is causing climate change” scientific article in 1938 presented it, to muted response, at the Royal Meteorological Society. 

Gilbert Plass was, more than anyone, responsible for putting carbon dioxide squarely on the agenda with his 1953 statements at the American Geophysical Union and then onwards in 1956 with his articles

What I think we can learn from this is that it’s always a messy murky picture in the early days of any issue. Later on it looks like a procession, but a good historian will try to remember the messiness and make it understandable, without removing the messiness.

Obviously that’s an ongoing process that we need to remember how little we knew and how confused the picture was.

What happened next

Callendar kept writing articles and letters. He died in 1964.

Gilbert Plass continued to be engaged for another few years on the climate issue and then wasn’t.

Roger Revelle died in 1991, having spent a long time trying to get the US state and others scientists politicians to take climate change seriously/

What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.

Categories
Science Scientists

February 9, 1956 – Scientists puzzle over where the carbon dioxide is going….

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