Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
minor changes in the earth's climate could threaten the water supply of the
American Southwest.
70
Revelle and other scientists emphasized that these
were mere conjectures— vague possibilities whose likelihood remained
unknown but whose potential consequences made the curious question
of CO
2
accumulation worth studying. “Only God knows whether what I
am saying is true,” Revelle admitted to his congressional audience. “What
I am driving at is that this business of the carbon dioxide production is in
fact a way of studying climatic changes.”
71
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, scientists began to chip away at some
of the basic uncertainties of atmospheric CO
2
. In 1958, Swedish meteorolo-
gists Bert Bolin and Erik Eriksson helped clarify the nature of the carbon
dioxide exchange between the oceans and the atmosphere that Revelle and
Suess had discussed briefly in their
Te l l u s
article the previous year. Bolin
and Eriksson used a short-term model of atmosphere-ocean interactions
that included a more sophisticated account of the buffering mechanism
referred to by Revelle and Suess. The Swedish researchers predicted that
atmospheric CO
2
would most likely increase by 25 percent by the end of the
century.
72
A recalibrated measurement of the Suess Effect, alongside Keel-
ing's steadily rising CO
2
curve from his measurements at the Mauna Loa
Observatory, seemed to confirm that atmospheric CO
2
, as Guy Stewart
Callendar had suggested years before, was in fact rising.
73
It also appeared
that humans were the primary cause.
Developments in CO
2
research overlapped with the broader scientific
community's increased awareness of and concern for related environ-
mental issues. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, scientists from a variety of
fields began to use their expertise to study the human and environmen-
tal impacts of the great scientific and technological achievements of the
twentieth century. Most famously, in 1962 marine biologist Rachel Carson
published
Silent Spring
, an exposé of the environmental and public health
impacts of chemical pesticides and one of the fundamental texts of modern
environmentalism.
74
Few scientists took the same approach or had the same impact as
Carson. Roger Revelle's career path was more characteristic of most
geophysical scientists' involvement in environmental issues.
75
His chief
environmental concerns involved nuclear radiation, population, and pol-
lution. Building on his earlier work with the navy, in the mid-1950s Revelle
chaired the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Biological
