Sixty three years ago, on this day, January 31st, 1963
At a meeting of the Federal Council on Science and Technology in 1963, Revelle, then the science advisor to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and the chairman of the PSAC’s Committee on Natural Resources, observed “a shift from earlier ‘Malthus’ attitudes of apprehension over scarcity … to an optimism that science could help meet resources needs, but with a new concern on man’s contribution to pollution of his own environment.”195
Revelle’s words are quoted in: Edward Wenk, Executive Secretary, Federal Council for Science and Technology, “Minutes and Record of Action,” 31 Jan 1963, I. I. Rabi Papers, LOC, Box 45, “Meetings, agenda and minutes, 1957-1972 (1),” 4. Loetscher 2022
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 385ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was as that after World War Two, and especially from the 1950s with coming in military Keynesianism, there was an enormous explosion of economic innovation, activity growth, partly to do with pent up consumer demand from the war, growing populations, but also all the new technologies of production that had been invented during or refined during World War Two; radar, sonar, jet engines, computing, the list goes on and on. This has become known as the “Great Acceleration.”
The specific context
So the early 60s is an interesting period, because people like Revelle are well aware of carbon dioxide build up and probably some other long-term issues, and they’re thinking about a switch over from scarcity thinking ie Malthus to cornucopia, but not a cornucopia without consequences.
What I think we can learn is that thoughtful people like Revelle were “on it”.
What happened next. Climate change, oddly, continued Revelle kept being relatively into climate issues
Then in his literally dying days in the early 1990s he was scammed by a failed scientist called Fred Singer, who put out a bullshit article under both their names.
You also had Murray Bookchin tackling similar issues to Revelle here in his post scarcity anarchism essay. And, of course, Bookchin was aware of CO2 build up, as per his “Crisis in our Cities” book, published in April 1965.
The other thing to think about is the tensions between impact science and production science.
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.
Sixty years ago today the first official government report to make significant mention of carbon dioxide build-up was released. Dr Marc Hudson of All Our Yesterdays investigates where the report came from, what it said, and what the consequences were.
The easy assumption of American superiority in science and technology was shattered on 4th October 1957, when the Soviet Union announced it had launched a satellite – Sputnik. As The Onion’s Our Dumb Century reported “American metal-bauble superiority was cast into grave doubt Thursday when the Russians launched a two-foot ball of tin into orbit around the Earth.”
In response to Sputnik, and its sequel a month later, the Americans threw money at the problem and also created the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). It was an expansion of an existing body that President Truman had created in 1951.
“Recalling the role the Soviet accomplishment had played in a lecture he gave at the MIT in 1962, Isidor Rabi, a physicist, chairman of the SAC and then a member of the PSAC for many years, remembered that “it was a serious matter that we could be beaten so badly, that we could so misunderstand the circumstances of the great development, that we should have lost out so completely.”
Isidor I. Rabi, “Science and Public Policy: Compton Lecture n° 2, MIT,” 8 March 1962, I. I. Rabi Papers, LOC, Box 11, “American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1941-1965,” 12.
(Loetscher, 2022, p.39)
PSAC produced worthy reports, some more influential than others. One of its first was on the parlous state of the US education system (For more about it, see Wang, 2008). By 1962, carbon dioxide build-up was on its agenda. PSAC had an international science panel, and a September 1962 paper “The Problem with Large-Scale Experimentation with Possible Environmental Effects” was produced. It warned that “alteration of our environment has reached the point of requiring intensive study and understanding on an urgent basis.”
Penned in unusual gravitas, the report stated that “never before has man had the power he now has to bring about changes, some of them irreversible, on a scale that can affect people in all parts of the world and that can cause major but indeterminate environmental changes.” The panel distinguished between two types of problematic large-scale experiments. The first related to actions that were individually small but whose compounded effects could be serious, and the continuous release of CO2 was cited as an example. The second category comprised nuclear tests, which were comparatively fewer, but had much larger consequences (or so it was thought at the time).
Loetscher, 2022 p.60-61
The climate issue
Carbon dioxide build-up as a potential problem was, by this time, hardly new. There’s a long pre-history, but for current purposes, we can begin 12 years before the PSAC report. In May 1953 Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass had warned that “The large increase in industrial activity during the present century is discharging so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the average temperature is rising at the rate of 1.5 degrees per century.”
The lack of accurate measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was one barrier – it was not absolutely clear that carbon dioxide levels were indeed rising. It was only by the late 1950s, with funding from the US and as part of the International Geophysical Year that accurate measurements were taken. By 1959 any doubt that carbon dioxide levels were increasing was removed (though the significance of this remained a source of legitimate scientific debate).
“Man’s ability to change the environment has increased greatly over the last sixty years and is likely to continue to increase for some time to come. Even now it is almost impossible to predict all of the consequences of man’s activities. It is possible, however, to predict that there will be problems…”
Present were Roger Revelle, a giant of US oceanography, who had already in 1956 warned US Senators of the possibility of dramatic changes to the climate due to carbon dioxide build-up, and Charles “Dave” Keeling, whom Revelle had hired to measure carbon dioxide levels. Both these men served on the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide subcommittee of PSAC in 1965 (1).
Revelle had already raised the carbon dioxide issue in 1964 in a separate committee within Lyndon Johnson’s Domestic Council. PSAC was another such chance to flag the problem. According to Hart and Victor (1993)
“Nor did Revelle’s chapter spring from new scientific evidence – although it did refer to the ongoing research programmes…. Revelle simply seems to have taken an otherwise unrelated opportunity presented to him as a member of a PSAC panel to try to bring the science and policy streams together.”
(Hart and Victor 1993, p.657).
By 1965, as concern about pollution in all its forms grew, various Senate and House of Representatives sub-committees held hearings, and a handful of witnesses made mention of CO2. This is not entirely surprising – after all, in his February 1965 message to Congress, President Johnson (in words surely penned by Revelle) had stated
“Air pollution is no longer confined to isolated places. This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Entire regional airsheds, crop plant environments, and river basins are heavy with noxious materials. Motor vehicles and home heating plants, municipal dumps and factories continually hurl pollutants into the air we breathe. Each day almost 50,000 tons of unpleasant, and sometimes poisonous, sulfur dioxide are added to the atmosphere, and our automobiles produce almost 300,000 tons of other pollutants.”
Meanwhile, PSAC was asked to create a report on “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment”.
“Restoring the Quality of the Environment”
The report, which you can read here begins, sensibly enough, with a definition.
“Environmental pollution is the unfavorable alteration of our surroundings, wholly or largely as a by-product of man’s actions, through direct or indirect effects of changes in energy patterns, radiation levels, chemical and physical constitution and abundances of organisms. These changes may affect man directly, or through his supplies of water and of agricultural and other biological products, his physical objects or possessions, or his opportunities for recreation and appreciation of nature.”
(PSAC 1965)
In a clear sentence that would not be published today without invocation of the magic properties of “technology,” the authors argue that “the production of pollutants and an increasing need for pollution management are an inevitable concomitant of a technological society with a high standard of living.”
The report covers – among other issues – soil contamination, sewage and agricultural waste.
On page 9 (and this is the complete quote) readers are told.
CLIMATIC EFFECTS OF POLLUTION
Carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas at the rate of 6 billion tons a year. By the year 2000 there will be about 25% more CO2 in our atmosphere than at present. This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable though local or even national efforts, could occur. Possibilities of bringing about countervailing changes by deliberately modifying other processes that affect climate may then be very important.
That is it for the body of the report as far as carbon dioxide build-up is concerned.
Among the key recommendations that the report made was that taxes should be imposed on polluting activities.
However, there were a series of annexes. In the carbon dioxide one, authored in the main by Revelle, the problem is succinctly outlined.
“The carbon in every barrel of oil and every lump of coal, as well as in every block of limestone, was once present in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide…. Within a few short centuries, we are returning to the air a significant part of the carbon that was slowly extracted by plants and buried in the sediments during half a billion years.”
The report flags two questions of particular import –
(1) What will the total quantity of CO2 injected into the atmosphere (but only partly retained there) be at different future times?
(2) What would be the total amount of CO2 injected into the air if all recoverable reserves of fossil fuels were consumed? At present rates of expansion in fossil fuel consumption this condition could be approached within the next 150 years.”
Revelle and colleagues admit that the first question is hard to answer, given that assumptions must be made about the amount of fossil fuels that will be used. They show their working to arrive at a figure of somewhere between 14 and 30 percent.
After flagging research being conducted about what the implications of carbon dioxide might be for the Earth’s temperature by Manabe and Weatherald (their pivotal paper would not appear until 1967) the report turns to possible impacts.
They flag
the “Melting of the Antarctic ice cap” (something well underway)
Rise of sea level.-”The melting of the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea level by 400 feet. If 1,000 years were required to melt the ice cap, the sea level would rise about 4 feet every 10 years, 40 feet per century. This is a hundred times greater than present worldwide rates of sea level change.”
Warming of sea water.
Increased acidity of fresh waters.
Increase in photosynthesis.
Revelle was not above echoing his earlier paper with Hans Seuss in 1957, in which they had suggested that mankind was engaged in an unwitting vast experiment.
“Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. The CO2 produced by this combustion is being injected into the atmosphere; about half of it remains there. The estimated recoverable reserves of fossil fuels are sufficient to produce nearly a 200% increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere.”
Perhaps the most startling element of the annex is an early proposal of solar radiation management. Revelle and his co-panellists noted that a
“change in the radiation balance in the opposite direction to that which might result from the increase of atmospheric CO2 could be produced by raising the albedo, or reflectivity, of the earth. Such a change in albedo could be brought about, for example by spreading very small reflecting particles over large oceanic areas. The particles should be sufficiently buoyant so that they will remain close to the sea surface and they should have a high reflectivity, so that even a partial covering of the surface would be adequate to produce a marked change in the amount of reflected sunlight. Rough estimates indicate that enough particles partially to cover a square mile could be produced for perhaps one hundred dollars. Thus a 1 % change in reflectivity might be brought about for about 500 million dollars a year, particularly if the reflecting particles were spread in low latitudes, where the incoming radiation is concentrated. Considering the extraordinary economic and human importance of climate, costs of this magnitude do not seem excessive.”
How was it reported and what were its consequences
Short term
There are two immediate consequences, around newspaper coverage and also industry awareness.
Newspaper coverage was extensive. The Forum (of Fargo, North Dakota) ran a front page story on Sunday November 7, with the headline “LBJ Panel urges Tax on Pollution and Junked Autos”. The Washington Post editorialised in a similar fashion.
On November 12, The Press Tribune or Roseville California ran an editorial under the unambiguous title “Utter Disaster Near at Hand?” It began
“Very recently, we’ve driven on the freeway systems in both Los Angeles and San Francisco and we wonder if the day of utter disaster isn’t near at hand….”
Then, to nail home the sense of foreboding
“Meanwhile, it’s not just the city dwellers who need to worry about what’s happening to our air. Some scientists fear that nothing really effective about pollution control will be done until it’s too late and that the human race will be doomed to die of poisoning. Other scientists fear that the amount of carbon dioxide and other combustion products going into the air is enough to create a hot-house effect holding the sun’s heat next to the earth, raising the average temperature and causing the polar ice caps to melt. This could raise the level of the sea, flood our coastal cities….”
The following week, under the title “Air Pollution is Menacing Earth’s Climate” a journalist called Philip Meyer reported thus
“Man may be changing earth’s climate. If he doesn’t stop: Our children could choke in a world of stifling heat and violent storms.
Polar ice could melt and the oceans rise to swallow up our coastal cities. The cause? Our own acts of air pollution.
This is not idle speculation or science fiction. Warnings have been sounded by responsible scientists in and out of government.
It is a simple projection of two undisputed facts: We are adding fantastic amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; carbon dioxide acts as a heat trap.
(Meyer, P. 1965. Air Pollution is Menacing Earth’s Climate.” The Record (Hackensack, New Jersey), November 17, p.52).
Many other regional papers covered it, at the time, and it had an afterlife.
It served as a “hook” for prominent science writers such as Irving Bengelsdorf of the Los Angeles Times (“Carbon Dioxide Enrichment – A Lot of Contemporary Sun” July 28 1966). P33.
As late as September 1966 it was still being invoked (see for example the Arizona Republic, September 29, “Cars blamed mostly for smog” p1 and 14).
Meanwhile Frank N. Ikard, who had been a Democratic congressman for Texas for ten years, before becoming the President of the American Petroleum Institute, gave a speech at the API’s annual meeting, held just after the release of the PSAC report. The relevant portion of this speech “Meeting the Challenges of 1966” is below.
Longer-term
As Spencer Weart acidly noted in his excellent book “The Discovery of Global Warming” the PSAC report
“put the issue on the official agenda at the highest level – although only as one item on a long list of environmental problems, many of which seemed more pressing. The next step in such matters was typically to ask the National Academy of Sciences to form a committee and issue an authoritative report. In 1966, the Academy duly pronounced on how human activity could influence climate. The experts sedately said there was no cause for dire warnings, but they did believe the CO2 buildup should be watched closely.”
(Weart, 2003, page 44).
The 1966 NAS Weather Modification report also stated that ‘the atmosphere is not a dump of unlimited capacity.’
According to Hart and Victor the PSAC report “seems to have made little substantive impression on policymakers, although NSF Director Leland Haworth did mention the concern in Congressional testimony, and in the introduction to the 1966 NSF annual report.” (Hart and Victor 1993, p.657).
Longer term influence through 1960s
The PSAC report was regularly cited – the CO2 increase of “25 per cent by the year 2000” figure pops up in various newspaper and magazine articles and books. By 1967 there are editorials in journals such as science and when magazines such as Time and Newsweek ran articles about air pollution, carbon dioxide build-up got a mention.
Roger Revelle was teaching at Harvard, and one of the students whom he explained the carbon dioxide issue to was the young Al Gore.
Further scientific work took place, and by the early 1970s the PSAC report was supplanted by publications such as Man’s Impact on Climate.
PSAC was abolished by Richard Nixon in 1973 – he was unhappy that it wasn’t cheerleading his agenda, and upset that a PSAC member spoke publicly against supersonic transport research.
In 1988 the carbon dioxide issue finally “broke through”, and politicians were forced to acknowledge its existence. Smears and anti-science propaganda campaigns, funded by fossil fuel companies, began. In 1992 the US administration of George HW Bush was successful in stripping out targets and timetables for emissions reductions by rich countries from the climate treaty about to be agreed at the Rio Earth Summit. Since then there has been three decades of meetings, while billions upon billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide are poured into the atmosphere (roughly 70% per annum more than in 1990).
Finally, the penny has dropped for many – that pledges and blandishments about the efficiency of markets are no match for physics.
The carbon dioxide levels in 1965 were approximately 320ppm. Today they stand at 425ppm, and are climbing at 2 to 3ppm each year.
We are in very very deep trouble. The FAFOcene has begun.
Footnotes
The other members of the subcommittee were Wally Broecker – who ten years later would publish the first academic paper to use the term ‘global warming’, Joseph Smagorinsky of the US Weather Bureau and Harmon Craig).
Further Reading
Hart, D. and Victor, D. 1993. Scientific Elites and the Making of US Policy for Climate Change Research, 1957-74. Social Studies of Science, Volume 23, Issue 4
Loetscher Audrey, 2022.0, A History of Unsustainability: The U.S. Government, the Fossil Fuel Industry, and Climate Change ( 1957 -1992)
Wang, Z. 2008. In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America.. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Pp. xix+454. $49.95.
Thirty four years ago, on this day, October 18th, 1991,
Fred Singer The Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming: Fact or Fiction? Tasman Institute Seminar
Not his first rodeo…
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was 355ppm. As of 2025, when this post was published, it is 425ppm. This matters because the more carbon dioxide in the air, the more heat gets trapped. The more heat, the more extreme weather events. You can make it more complicated than that if you want, but really, it’s not. Fwiw, I have a tattoo of the Keeling Curve on my left forearm.
The broader context was that carbon dioxide build-up had broken through as an issue in 1988. By 1989 the George C Marshall Institute (set up to shill for Reagan’s Star Wars bullshit) had entered the fray and was enabling denialist efforts, alongside the Global Climate Coalition etc. Australia was one market for its shite.
Singer – Singer had been a semi-respected scientist and bureaucrat from the 1950s onward. But at some point he had jumped the shark. Here, he was fresh from warping the words of a dying Roger Revelle, who had known that many people did not think Singer was much of a scientist…
The specific context was that the Ecologically Sustainable Development process was coming to an end and the moment of maximum danger – where the government might actually take on some of its recommendations – was about now. If you were going to bring out some idiot not very good scientist (as per Roger Revelle) now would be a good time. And so it came to pass…
What I think we can learn from this – evil people aren’t necessarily stupid or incompetent. (And conversely, the “good” guys aren’t all smart and competent.)
What happened next – The ESD got thrown in the bin by Paul Keating, who toppled Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke a couple of months later. The Tasman Institute kept up with the tours, economic modelling etc.
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.
Sixty nine years ago, on this day, March 2nd, 1956,
A modest plan crystallized in meetings of experts arranged by the U.S. National Committee for the IGY in early 1956. Here two senior scientists, Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, argued the value of measuring CO2 in the ocean and air simultaneously at various points around the globe. The ultimate goal was “a clearer understanding of the probable climatic effects of the predicted great industrial production of carbon-dioxide over the next 50 years.” But the immediate aim was to observe how seawater took up the gas, as just one of the many puzzles of geochemistry. Revelle had become interested in the question through his own research, which had been amply supported by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research and other federal agencies, whose interest in the oceans was whetted by the competition with the Soviet Union.
The committee granted Revelle some small funds for measuring CO2. The key actor in this, and much else in getting greenhouse gas studies underway, was Harry Wexler, a meteorologist turned administrator who served as Chief of the Scientific Services division of the U.S. Weather Bureau. Wexler was an outstanding example of the thoughtful officials who worked behind the scenes to identify and promote promising research, while the scientists they supported got all the credit”
Clearer understanding:” Minutes of IGY Working Group on Oceanography, Regional Meeting, 2 March 1956, Washington, DC, copy in provisional box 96, folder 243, “IGY-CSAGI Working Group on Oceanography,” Maurice Ewing Collection, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 313ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the International Geophysical Year was going to start in 15 months, and it was going to be an 18 month collaboration of measurement and experiments around, well geophysics.
What I think we can learn from this is that scientists had a wish list of things that they wanted to investigate so they could better understand what was going on. Just in general, carbon dioxide build up was certainly known of, but it was by no means a central focus of the Geophysical Year.
What happened next
Roger Revelle was able to use a bit of spare money so that Charles Dave Keeling could start measuring CO2 at insanely precise levels
NB As per Rebecca John’s archival work – Keeling had already been measuring for the industry funded “Air Pollution Council”.
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.
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
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.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 320ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that US scientists, including Roger Revelle and Charles Dave Keeling had been measuring and pondering. A couple of years before this memo, in March 1963 the Rockefeller-funded Conservation Foundation had held a meeting on carbon dioxide build-up. The following year Revelle had chaired a group looking at environmental problems (the group included Margaret Mead!).
What I think we can learn from this is that the information was getting to the very top quite quickly.
Two years to the day later an editorial appeared in Science pointing to … carbon dioxide as a problem
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.
Thirty three years ago, on this day, July 15th, 1991, the famed US scientist Roger Revelle died. Just before he died there was an article published (he’d been arm-twisted etc by that turd Fred Singer, whom he’d known for decades) which said climate change was nothing to worry about. This article was used as a denialist talking point for decades, as part of the confusion campaigns funded by Big Oil etc.
Revelle helped to establish that carbon levels in the atmosphere were steadily rising and also taught science to a young Al Gore in the 1960s. As Revelle wrote in 1992: “There is a good but by no means certain chance that the world’s average climate will become significantly warmer during the next century.”
Singer approached him off the back of this statement, asking if the two men could collaborate on an article for The Washington Post.
Conned at death
That night Revelle suffered a heart attack and was rushed from the airport to a local hospital for a triple-bypass, and was not discharged until May that year.
Singer nevertheless continued to press the scientist to work on a journal article. “Whenever Singer sent him a draft, Revelle buried it under piles of paper on his desk. When Singer called, [Revelle’s secretary] would dig up the draft and put it on the top, and Revelle would bury it again,” records American historian of Science at the University of Harvard professor, Naomi Oreskes, in her account of the episode.
“Some people don’t think Fred Singer is a very good scientist,” Revelle told his secretary.
Later that year Singer published his article, with Revelle named as second author, in the journal Cosmos. It stated boldly: “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”
The words were copied and pasted from an earlier article published by Singer – and directly contradicted Revelle’s own publicly stated views.
Revelle died of a heart attack the following July. Family members, friends and students all claimed that Singer had pressured or tricked the dying scientist into signing off a journal article which presented an argument opposed to his own.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 354ppm. As of 2024 it is 426ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Revelle was old, had been sick for some years. He was a giant of all sorts of science. The one is probably most remembered for the climate stuff, but there was a lot of formidable oceanography work going on for decades.
Why this matters is that Fred Singer latched on to Revelle and got him to “co author” a piece that said CO2 wasn’t really a problem. He then used it as part of the denial war.
George Will wrote stupid column (I know, hold the front page). Revelle’s daughter pushed back. Then when Al Gore tried to set the record straight, some anchordroid – I want to say Tom Brokaw – tried to say that it was all part of the culture war.
What we learn is that slinging mud works.
What happened next? The grad student who had to bend recanted that. Singer is dead at last, thank goodness, but my goodness, the damage he did.
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.
Sixty seven years ago, on this day, May 19th, 1957 the Los Angeles Times asked the question (not for the first time.) This was all part of the pre-International Geophysical Year (IGY) build-up…
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the Los Angeles Times had already run some articles about this. And here’s another one. In the context that senior politicians, scientists had been talking about this, not just Revelle, but also Kaplan, Wexler, etc. And it was speculative, but Gilbert Plass by this time had come out with his article in Tellus and was working on one for Scientific American.
What we learn is that, again, if you were reading a newspaper the idea that over time the carbon dioxide could build up and cause mayhem was explained to you. Whether you chose to remember it, or believe it was up to you.
What happened next, the International Geophysical Year, Sputnik the Keeling Curve, the remorseless rise of emissions and then 30 years later, greenhouse effect would become undeniable. Except to those who chose to deny it, of course.
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.
Sixty years ago, on this day, April 4th, 1964, a working group of the President’s Scientific Advisory Council got looking at climate change…
PSAC was the second presidential task force to whom Revelle had introduced the issue of CO2. The first was a subgroup of President Johnson’s Domestic Council, which released a report in 1964. Joseph Fisher, Paul Freund, Margaret Mead and Roger Revelle., “Notes Prepared by Working Group Five, White House Group on Domestic Affairs,” April 4 1964.
(Howe, 2014:219) [Mead and 1975 conference, with Stephen Schnenider)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 319ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Roger Revelle, Conservation Foundation people, Charles Keeling, etc were looking at the carbon dioxide numbers and thinking, “you know, this is one to keep an eye on” as per the 1963 meeting.
And so on to Johnson. Within the Presidential Science Advisory Committee, which had been set up in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, the climate issue was just one of those things that people thought about. (I’m not sure how Margaret Mead came to be involved, but I’m glad she was!)
The thing that we learned is that there they are within the policy subsystems beavering away, trying to get people to take this stuff seriously.
In November 1965 there was a long report, led by John Tukey, that kinda-sorta emerged from this PSAC group, but went much broader.
How did Margaret Mead get involved? She and then-husband Gregory Bateson will already have known about the issue via G. Evelyn Hutchinson, I’m sure.
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.
Sixty eight years ago, on this day, March 19th, 1956, the question of possible climate change due to carbon dioxide build-up gets an airing (sorry) in the Washington Post.
19 March 1956 Washington Post story on Revelle’s predictions
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 314ppm. As of 2024 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Roger Revelle as well as being a really good scientist was a really good political operator. He knew how to tell Senators interesting stories so that they would give big science, big money. And one of the stories Revelle was telling in ‘56, ahead of the impending International Geophysical Year was that carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere might cause some interesting physical effects.
What we learn from this is that the idea of the independent scientists mucking around with his test tubes is a comforting myth, but only a myth. And already, by the end of the 40s, this was entirely obvious, given how the war had been one, Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush, all of that stuff.
What happened next? With some of the money, a tiny portion of the money that Revellel got, he hired Charles David Keeling to make fantastically accurate measurements of atmospheric CO2, giving us the Keeling Curve and evidence that yes, carbon dioxide was definitely building up in the atmosphere. Until that point this was not entirely certain, though it was strongly suspected. It’s always good to have proper evidence to back up your suspicions, isn’t it?
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.
References
Norman, L. 1956. Fumes Seen Warming Arctic Seas. The Washington Post and Times Herald; March 19, pg. 3
