Rerun: Originally published here in April 2019
Primary Source: Wikipedia
Revelle was a scientist at the University of California San Diego and among the early scientists to study man made global warming.
UC San Diego's first college is named Revelle College, in his honor.
Awards:
Alexander Agassiz Medal (1963)
Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (1984)
Vannevar Bush Award (1984)
William Bowie Medal (1968)
National Medal of Science (1990)
Scientific career:
-- Scripps Institution of Oceanography
-- University of California San Diego
Roger Revelle graduated from Pomona College in 1929 with early studies in geology.
He earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of California, Berkeley in 1936.
Much of his early work in oceanography took place at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in San Diego.
He was director of SIO from 1950 to 1964.
He was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1974).
Revelle was instrumental in creating the International Geophysical Year (IGY) in 1958, and was founding chairman of the first Committee on Climate Change and the Ocean (CCCO) under the International Oceanic Commission (IOC).
Under Revelle's directorship, SIO (Scripps) participated in, and later became the principal center for the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Program.
In July 1956, Charles David Keeling joined the SIO staff to head the program, and began measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Mauna Loa, Hawaii, still being done today.
Hans Suess was recruited by Revelle, and they co-authored a 1957 paper using Carbon-14 isotope levels to assess the rate at which carbon dioxide added by fossil fuel combustion, since the start of the industrial revolution, had accumulated in the atmosphere.
They concluded that most of it had been absorbed by the Earth's oceans, contrary to older assumptions that it would simply accumulate in the upper atmosphere and increase the average temperature near the earth's surface.
There had been no greenhouse effect caused warming yet, but the Suess-Revelle paper suggested that increasing human gas emissions might change this.
A November 1957 report in The Hammond Times described Revelle's research as suggesting that "a large scale global warming, with radical climate changes may result" – the first use of the term global warming.
Other articles in the same journal discussed carbon dioxide levels, but the Suess-Revelle paper was "the only one, of three, to stress rising CO2 levels that might cause global warming over time."
In the November 1982 Scientific American letters to the editors, Revelle stated:
"We must conclude that until a warming trend that exceeds the noise level of natural climatic fluctuations becomes clearly evident, there will be considerable uncertainty and a diversity of opinions about the amplitude of the climatic effects of increased atmospheric CO2.
If the modelers are correct, such a signal should be detectable within the next 10 or 15 years."
Roger's daughter, Carolyn Revelle, wrote:
" ... our father and the "father" of the greenhouse effect ... he remained deeply concerned about global warming until his death in July 1991.
But in that same year he wrote: "The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time."
At his death in 1991, Revelle was still waiting for proof that global warming was a serious problem.
Many other scientists had already jumped to that conclusion without scientific proof.
Today there is scientific proof, through CO2 and global temperature measurements, that past global warming has been mild, inconsistent, and beneficial for our planet.
Whether the cause of global warming is natural, or man made, is still unknown, although many scientists have jumped to a conclusion on the cause !