Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
climate. Funding for the American portion of the IGY came from Con-
gress, primarily via the National Science Foundation. In May of 1957, mem-
bers of the National Committee for the IGY— Wexler, Berkner, and Revelle
among them— went before the House Appropriations Committee to ask
for $39 million to run their eighteen-month program, including more than
$2 million for oceanographic research and almost $3 million for research in
meteorology.
24
In testimony that covered everything from the aridity of the
Martian atmosphere to the depth of the Gulf Stream, Revelle introduced
members of Congress to the possible relationship between an increase in
CO
2
and an increase in global temperature, and he noted the many uncer-
tainties that a program in CO
2
monitoring could hope to resolve. Congress
approved the program, and ultimately IGY vessels and stations measured
CO
2
at sixty locations around the world.
25
For eighteen
months a full half
century ago, CO
2
stood on the front lines of Cold War science.
forecasts and models
Revelle's growing interest in CO
2
paralleled other developments in
climate-related atmospheric science that were also entangled in the web
of Cold War research. These were developments in atmospheric model-
ing, in particular the advent of general circulation models.
26
Early numeri-
cal models of the earth's atmosphere grew out of efforts to use computers
to forecast weather accurately during and after the Second World War,
and in the ensuing decade scientists began to modify these models to
attempt to predict changes in climate. Even more so than CO
2
monitor-
ing efforts, models of the atmosphere had obvious applicability to ques-
tions about fallout and the potential distribution of radioactivity in the
event of a nuclear exchange. In addition, some scientists and politicians
linked modeling the weather and climate to controlling these geophysi-
cal forces, both for the domestic good via rainmaking and as a powerful
Cold War weapon. Ultimately, the combination of the Scripps Institu-
tion's CO
2
research, the expansion of CO
2
monitoring during the IGY, and
this government- sponsored effort to create a realistic, predictive model of
atmospheric circulation all helped pave the way for the institutionalization
of atmospherically oriented climate change research in America.
Climate science and meteorology both grew remarkably in the 1950s
Cold War milieu, but the relationship between the two disciplines has not
