The Cold War Roots of Global Warming - Behind the Curve - page 19

and chemical phenomena that could complicate their models and under-
standing of the global atmosphere. As they did elsewhere, in the Blue Book
these scientific leaders associated questions about CO 2 with questions
about nuclear testing: “Man's activities in consuming fossil fuels during
the past hundred years, and in detonating nuclear weapons during the past
decade have been on a scale sufficient to make it worthwhile to examine the
effects these activities have had upon the atmosphere. Reference is made
here to the still unsolved question of whether the carbon dioxide content
of the atmosphere is increasing as a result of combustion processes and the
even more elusive question as to possible changes in the earth's electrical
field as a result of nuclear explosions.” 68
The plan to study CO 2 and climate at NCAR was hardly a clarion call
warning of global warming. It was, like Roger Revelle's famous “geophysi-
cal experiment” comment, primarily a statement of scientific uncertainty.
Even so, by 1963, it was difficult for scientists to look at the Keeling Curve
without scratching their heads. If NCAR's structure reflected atmospheric
scientists' doubts about certain aspects of the Cold War research system,
when atmospheric scientists made CO 2 a programmatic focus at the new
institution they also sowed their specific doubts about CO 2 into the field's
institutional soil. Both at NCAR and elsewhere, in the 1960s these seeds
of doubt about atmospheric CO 2 began to germinate. They were watered,
in part, by Charles David Keeling himself.
the “invisiBle Pollutant”
Just as it was Keeling's bosses, rather than Keeling himself, who put CO 2
on the Cold War research map, so too did Keeling's scientific superiors
articulate a connection between CO 2 and pollution before Keeling put the
problem succinctly in 1963. As early as 1957, when Roger Revelle testified
before Congress on CO 2 monitoring, the handful of atmospheric scientists
interested in CO 2 monitoring had used the potentially disruptive impacts
of CO 2 on climate to lobby for financial support. A rise in global CO 2 could
raise temperatures, they argued, which in turn could melt glaciers, leading
to a rise in sea level. Changes in temperature might also lead to changes
in weather that would affect agricultural output in certain regions— for
the better in some places, for the worse in others. 69 Making his case before
western members of Congress in 1957, for example, Revelle suggested that