Tag: Roger Revelle

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Science Scientists

April 2, 1979 – AAAS workshop in Anaheim begins…

On this day, April 2 1979. Yes, the same year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science started a four day workshop in Anaheim, Maryland. 

The following from the rather good recent Verso book “The Great Adaptation” helps set the scene

“The US Department of Energy was no longer willing to overlook the climate question. In collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAA) the leading US scientific body and publisher of the journal Science, it financed a research programme on the social and economic impacts of climate change. Roger Revelle and Stephen Schneider were each involved in organising the programme, which in 1979 resulted in the first international conference dedicated to the social sciences of global warming. This seminar, held in Annapolis, Maryland, sought to bring together speialisgts in economic history, anthropology, economics and political science to think through the consequences of global warming and the responses it demanded: Schneider, Revelle, Kellogg, Orr Roberts, Kenneth Hare and Crispin Tickell all took part…”

(Felli, 2015/2021: p44)

Why this matters. 

Again? I keep banging on about the late 1970s. There’s a method to my madness, which you’ll hopefully read about in a gasp yes, book at some point. 

What happened next?

More studies, but then basically, with the coming of the Reagan administration in 1981, the funding dried up, and Reagan appointees tried, for a few years, at least, to silence the climate scientists. See, for example, what happened to James Hansen in 1981 after his front page story in the New York Times. By the mid-80s, this became much harder, and eventually they had to move to plan B…

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Science Scientists United States of America

March 12, 1963 – first scientific meeting about C02 build-up

On this day in 1963, the first ever policymaker meeting – in the West at least(1) – specifically around carbon dioxide bonding happened in New York under the auspices of Laurence Rockefeller’s organisation, the Conservation Foundation, (not to be confused with the Conservation Society launched in the UK three years later, and not funded by Rockefeller.)

The account of the meeting, which you can read here, had the snappy title “Implications of rising carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere; a statement of trends and implications of carbon dioxide research reviewed at a conference of scientists.”

Present at the meeting were Roger Revelle, Gilbert Plasss, Charles Keeling, and an Englishman called Frank Fraser Darling – someone we will return to…

The context was that as of 1959, it has become clear that carbon dioxide was indeed building up in the atmosphere, and that eventually, this would lead to warming of the planet. And this would lead to ice caps melting in flooded cities, changing weather patterns, etc. 

But at this stage, in early 1963 the assumption was, this would be a problem in a couple of 100 years as per Svante Arrhenius

Why this matters. 

The Conservation Foundation report of this symposium was not a best-seller, but it DOES pop up in the reference list of various books and articles over the rest of the decade, before it starts to be supplanted by later events with more information.

What happened next?

Revelle worked on a report for Lyndon Johnson’s science subcommittee with Margaret Mead Frank Fraser Darling would talk about the build up of co2 as a problem and his reef lectures for the BBC in November of 1969

And the CO2 would continue to accumulate

For more about the Rockefellers role in postwar environmentalism this article “The Eco-Establishment “by Katherine Barkley and Steve WeissmanRamparts Magazine, May 1970, pp. 48-50

Footnotes

(1) “Fedorov and Budyko were both key instigators of a specially convened meeting on the transformation of climate which took place in Leningrad during April 1961.40 This meeting, together with a related workshop the following June, represented the first focussed Soviet discussions concerning anthropogenic climate change” (Oldfield, 2018: 45).

Oldfield, J. (2018) Imagining climates past, present and future: Soviet contributions to the science of anthropogenic climate change, 1953e1991. Journal of Historical Geography 60 41- 51.)

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Ignored Warnings United States of America

Feb 8, 1965- All the way with LBJ – first President to say “carbon dioxide is building up”

On this day in 1965 President Lyndon Baines Johnson gave a “Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty.” 

He said

“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.”

Those words were written by – or at the very least based on the research of – Roger Revelle. Exactly 9 years earlier, on 8 February 1956  Revelle had given “Testimony before the House Committee on Appropriations.” And he’d told the Congressmen present

“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. . . .”

And here we are.

Sources- 

REVELLE, ROGER, and PAUL S. SUTTER. “TESTIMONY BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS, FEBRUARY 8, 1956.” Making Climate Change History: Documents from Global Warming’s Past, edited by JOSHUA P. HOWE, University of Washington Press, 2017, pp. 60–63, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnkd5.13.