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early articulation of the most important refrain in the political history of
global warming: more and better science, applied in the right way by the
right people, would solve the problem.
a child of the cold War
It would be difficult to overstate the impact of the Cold War on the devel-
opment of atmospheric science and CO 2 research in the United States.
The juxtaposition between the experiences of Guy Stewart Callendar,
the obscure British steam engineer, and those of Charles David Keeling
and Roger Revelle underscore the point. In 1938, Callendar contended that
human consumption of fossil fuels was, via the accumulation of CO 2 in
the atmosphere, slowly raising the mean temperature of the earth. Fossil
fuel combustion, he showed, had added about 150 billion tons of CO 2 to
the atmosphere, roughly two-thirds of which remained aloft. Using the
known radiation absorption coefficients for water and CO 2 , he estimated
that this increase in atmospheric CO 2 should cause the world to warm at
a rate of about 0.003ºC per year— a figure not far from the 0.005ºC rate
of warming measured by meteorologists in the half century before Cal-
lendar's paper. 95 That is to say, (1) CO 2 was rising; (2) increased CO 2 would
lead to warming; and (3) the earth was in fact getting warmer. 96 “Few of
those familiar with the natural heat exchanges of the atmosphere,” Cal-
lendar wrote, “would be prepared to admit that the activities of man could
have any influence upon phenomena of so vast a scale.” 97 Nevertheless, he
contended, “such influence is not only possible, but is actually occurring
at the present time.” 98 The earth, he declared, was warming, and humans
were responsible.
In retrospect, Callendar's contention about anthropogenic warming
seems prescient. Callendar was right. And yet in his own time, Callendar's
claim garnered little attention outside of a small community of meteorolo-
gists; and among this small group, few took the notion of human-caused
global change seriously.
By 1965, however, atmospheric scientists had incorporated CO 2 research
into individual projects and institutional directives at the national and
international levels, and CO 2 had appeared at least twice on the agenda of
the president of the United States. 99 In part, the increased visibility of CO 2
and climate arose out of advances in science itself. Papers in the 1950s and
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