Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Effects of Atomic Radiation, which released a report in 1956 (the so-called
BEAR report).
76
In 1961, he left the Scripps Institution to work as science
advisor to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, perhaps the most vocal
supporter of conservation in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,
responsible for helping environmentalists with several initiatives: the
Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey, the Clean Air Act
of 1963, the Wilderness Act of 1964, and the Endangered Species Act of
1966. In 1964, Revelle moved to Cambridge to head Harvard's new Center
for Population Studies, where he focused on the “consequences of popula-
tion change on human lives and societies, and of the biological, cultural,
and economic forces that influence human fertility.”
77
Revelle was not
necessarily an environmentalist; rather, he shared with his colleagues a
commitment to the sensible scientific management of the environment
and natural resources for the benefit of humankind.
A number of atmospheric scientists echoed Revelle's personal and pro-
fessional interest in environmental issues, and in the early 1960s they began
to address CO
2
as it related to pollution, a buzzword of the environmental
movement
.
Initially, Revelle and his colleagues drew a loose association
between CO
2
research and air pollution, much the same as they had drawn
an association between CO
2
and radiation since the mid-1950s. For exam-
ple, in the 1962 report
The Atmospheric Sciences, 1961-1971
, commissioned by
President Kennedy's science advisor Jerome Wiesner, the National Acad-
emy of Sciences' Committee on Atmospheric Sciences proposed to study
water vapor and CO
2
alongside other trace gases— ozone, methane, oxides
of nitrogen and sulfur, and “several radioactive gases”— associated with
industrial air pollution.
78
The relationships between these gases, as well as
their potential impacts, remained vague, but the report implied that CO
2
accumulation, inadvertent weather modification, atmospheric radiation,
and air pollution were all of a piece.
79
As a pollutant, however, CO
2
was problematic. CO
2
was a good indi-
cator of smog, haze, and other forms of pollution associated with fos-
sil fuel consumption, but as Charles David Keeling noted in a piece he
wrote for a Conservation Foundation conference in 1963, “air pollution
in the ordinary sense does not include the CO
2
rise in the atmosphere.”
80
Whereas substances like DDT, strontium 90, or sulfur dioxide directly
threatened the health and well-being of ecosystems and human popula-
tions, CO
2
was a natural product of animal respiration and a gas essential
