Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
problems— and potential solutions to them— in a comprehensive execu-
tive report,
Restoring the Quality of Our Environment
.
88
Commissioned by
Donald Hornig, President Johnson's special assistant for science and tech-
nology, the PSAC Environmental Pollution Panel broadly defined pollu-
tion to encompass a loose constellation of general and specific issues, and
CO
2
made the cut. The report tackled the public health impacts of air
pollution, water pollution, and pesticides; the impact of human actions on
other living organisms; the “impairment of water and soil resources”; the
“polluting effects of household detergents”; urban decay; and the climatic
effects of CO
2
.
89
“Environmental pollution,” the report read, “is the unfa-
vorable alteration of our surroundings, wholly or largely as a by-product of
man's actions, through direct or indirect effects of changes in energy pat-
terns, radiation levels, chemical and physical constitution and abundances
of organisms. These changes may affect man directly, or through his sup-
plies of water and of agricultural and other biological products, his physical
objects or possessions, or his opportunities for recreation and appreciation
of nature.”
90
According to the PSAC authors, though it affected humans'
well-being only indirectly through the mechanisms of climatic change,
CO
2
— the “invisible pollutant”— nevertheless constituted a potentially
dangerous by-product of advanced industrial society that needed to be
monitored and potentially counteracted in the future.
91
Despite their growing concerns about the accumulation of CO
2
from
fossil fuels, however, geophysical scientists in the 1960s remained charac-
teristically optimistic about their ability to counteract the gas's climatic
impacts through intentional geophysical modification. Roger Revelle
served as the chair of PSAC's carbon dioxide group, and as usual he
pointed out the pressing need for better understanding of atmospheric
phenomena— understanding that could lead to control.
92
The first step
was to build a more comprehensive model of the atmosphere, a model that
Revelle predicted the Weather Bureau would have up and running in less
than two years.
93
The understanding gleaned from such models would ulti-
mately allow humans to make conscious changes to other processes affect-
ing climate. Revelle was particularly sanguine about plans to change the
earth's albedo— the sun's energy reflected back into space by the surface of
the earth— by scattering reflective particulates over swaths of the ocean.
94
If Keeling's 1963 article postulated CO
2
as an environmental problem for
the first time, Revelle's response to that reinterpretation of CO
2
was an
