Our World and Everything in It

People like to bring up the fact that Al Gore is not a scientist. That shouldn’t exclude him from being a messenger of a scientist though. Many  people still do not know the scientist behind global warming. His name is Roger Revelle. Gore is his messenger. Roger is deceased. Gore was impressed by him long ago at Harvard College. Other scientists have looked at this scientist’s theory and concurred that he was right. Here’s a quick look at Roger from Wikipedia.
Roger Revelle graduated from Pomona in 1929 with early studies in geology and then earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of California, Berkley.  Much of his early work in oceanography took place at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in San Diego. He was also Oceanographer of the Navy during WWII. He became director of SIO from  1950 to 1964. He was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1974.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (or AAAS) is an organization that promotes cooperation between scientists, defends scientific freedom, encourages scientific responsibility and supports scientific education and science outreach for the betterment of all humanity. It is the world’s largest general scientific society. The AAAS is also the publisher of the well-known scientific journal Science.
Revelle was instrumental in creating the International Geophysical Year in 1958, and was founding chairman of the first Committee on Climate Change and the Ocean under the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research and the International Oceanic Commission. During planning for the IGY, under Revelle’s directorship, SIO 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 Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and Antarctica.
In 1957, Revelle co-authored a paper with Hans Suess that suggested that the Earth’s oceans would absorb excess carbon dioxide generated by humanity at a much slower rate than previously predicted by geoscientists, thereby suggesting that human gas emissions might create a “greenhouse effect” that would cause global warming over time. Although other articles in the same journal discussed carbon dioxide levels, the Suess-Revelle paper was “the only one of the three to stress the growing quantity of CO2 contributed by our burning of fossil fuel, and to call attention to the fact that it might cause global warming over time.”
Revelle and Suess described the “buffer factor”, now known as the “Revelle factor”, which is a resistance to atmospheric carbon dioxide being absorbed by the ocean surface layer posed by bicarbonate chemistry. Essentially, in order to enter the ocean, carbon dioxide gas has to partition into carbonate ion, bicarbonate ion, carbonic acid and sodium bicarbonate, among other ionic compounds, and the product of these many chemical dissociation constants factors into a kind of back-pressure that limits how fast the carbon dioxide can enter the surface ocean. Geology, geochemisty, atmospheric chemistry, ocean chemistry … this amounted to one of the earliest examples of “integrated assessment”, which 50 years later became an entire branch of global warming science.
As we keep hearing about surface water temperature in the ocean off of Chili, or off of some other coast, and as it relates to us in the form of El Nino’s, Noreasters, drought, floods, and tornadoes of greater intensity, we might just see the lightbulb go on where Roger’s global warming theory is concerned and quit arguing.
 
 
 

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.