Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1960s on the physics and chemistry of CO
2
by Gilbert Plass, Roger Revelle
and Hans Suess, and Bert Bolin and Erik Eriksson, for example, alongside
better models of the general circulation and the earth's radiation budget
developed by Jule Charney, Joseph Smagorinsky, and others began to paint
a clearer picture of the relationship between CO
2
and climate.
These scientific developments dovetailed with philosophical, financial,
and structural changes in atmospheric science that were ultimately just
as important as science itself in putting CO
2
on the popular and political
map. These changes were by and large products of the Cold War, and they
begin, as many Cold War stories do, with the bomb. The explosion of the
first atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945 established humans
as agents of large-scale geophysical change in a new way, and it opened the
door for the possibility that human actions might already be altering geo-
physical processes unintentionally. Callendar suggested that his audience
would not be ready to admit that humans could affect the earth on such a
large scale. After Alamogordo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki— to say nothing
of the H-bomb tests of the mid-1950s— far fewer people would be so quick
to deny humanity's geophysical agency.
Perhaps more important, the advent of the bomb fostered the devel-
opment of an expansive science infrastructure, with the financial and
technological resources necessary for studying the earth's large-scale
geophysical systems at a scale beyond what amateur scientists like Cal-
lendar ever could have imagined. Leaders in atmospheric and other
geophysical sciences like Roger Revelle, Harry Wexler, Lloyd Berkner,
and Jule Charney soon began to capitalize on newly available scientific
resources by framing research on CO
2
and climate in terms of its poten-
tial geopolitical significance. These scientists promoted atmospheric sci-
ence and CO
2
research through individual projects like Keeling's Mauna
Loa monitoring stations and the global monitoring effort of the Inter-
national Geophysical Year and through the founding of institutions of
atmospheric science, most notably NCAR. These scientists' successes
in incorporating CO
2
research, atmospheric modeling, and studies of
weather and climate control into the agenda of government-sponsored
Cold War science fueled a growing interest in and concern over CO
2
in
the early 1960s.
Many atmospheric scientists hoped to tackle CO
2
and atmospheric cir-
culation on a worldwide basis, but interest in atmospheric science was by
