Roger Revelle

• 1. Introduction

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  Roger Randall Dougan Revelle was, by his own account, the grandfather of the greenhouse effect. That was how he described himself to a reporter after receiving the National Medal of Science in 1991, just months before his death. The phrase was modest by any measure. Revelle had spent decades prodding governments, training scientists, crossing oceans, and testifying to Congress that the planet itself was in danger. He called Earth a spaceship. And he said so at a time when almost no one in public life had heard of global warming, let alone used that term.

  His career reached into oceanography, tectonic plate research, nuclear radiation biology, world hunger, and the founding of one of the most research-intensive university campuses in the United States. What ties those threads together is a particular temperament: a man who believed that science should answer the largest questions, even the uncomfortable ones. The question of what happens when humanity pumps carbon dioxide into the air was, for Revelle, not an abstract concern. It was an ongoing experiment, one he said "could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future." How that warning traveled from a 1957 journal article to the center of a vice-presidential debate is a story that reaches well beyond the laboratory.

• 2. From Seattle to Scripps

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  Seattle was Roger Revelle's birthplace, on the 7th of March 1909, but it was southern California where he grew up and where his scientific life would be anchored. He graduated from Pomona College in 1929 with early work in geology, then earned a PhD in oceanography from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1936, studying under George Louderback and joining Theta Tau Professional Engineering Fraternity, which had its roots in mining engineering and drew students with strong ties to geology.

  At Berkeley he also met and married Ellen Clark in 1931. She was a graduate of Scripps College in psychology and would outlive him by nearly two decades. His early oceanographic research took place at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, and during the Second World War he served as the Navy's oceanographer. By 1950 he was director of SIO, a post he would hold until 1964. He stood against the UC faculty loyalty oath during the McCarthy period, a decision that required backbone in the academic climate of that era. He served as Science Advisor to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall under President Kennedy and went on to lead the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1974.

• 3. Charting the Pacific

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  After World War II, Revelle helped determine which Navy-funded research projects received support, and he pressed hard for the idea that the Navy should back basic research, not only applied technology. That advocacy shaped American oceanography for a generation. At Scripps in the 1950s, he launched a series of major long-range expeditions, each named for the stretch of ocean it crossed: MIDPAC, TRANSPAC, EQUAPAC, and NORPAC. TRANSPAC was a joint venture with Canada and Japan.

  Revelle also served as one of the committee chairmen for the National Academy of Sciences studies known as BEAR, the biological effects of atomic radiation program, whose results were published in 1956. In 1952, working with Dr. Seibert Q. Duntley, he brought the MIT Visibility Lab to SIO with Navy funding. He became the first president of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research, advising on international projects, and was a regular consultant to the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission after it was created in 1960. He and colleagues at Scripps also helped plan the American share of the oceanographic program for the International Geophysical Year, a worldwide scientific effort. Along with partners at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, that planning led directly to the carbon dioxide research that would define his legacy.

• 4. The Experiment Nobody Could Repeat

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  In July 1956, a young scientist named Charles David Keeling joined the Scripps staff to lead the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Program, beginning measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii and in Antarctica. That program grew directly from Revelle's directorship and from preparations for the International Geophysical Year of 1958, which Revelle was instrumental in creating.

  Revelle had also recruited Hans Suess to Scripps, and together they wrote a 1957 article that used carbon-14 isotope levels to trace how much carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion since the start of the industrial revolution had accumulated in the atmosphere. Their conclusion ran against the prevailing assumption: most of that carbon dioxide had been absorbed by the oceans, not by the upper atmosphere as earlier geoscientists such as Chamberlin, Arrhenius, and Callendar had expected. The greenhouse warming those earlier scientists had anticipated had not yet clearly appeared. But Revelle and Suess warned that increasing human emissions might change that. Their precise formulation was that "human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future."

  The 1957 article also described what Revelle and Suess called the "buffer factor," a term now known as the "Revelle factor." It describes the chemical resistance of the ocean's surface layer to absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide, a function of how carbon dioxide must partition into components of carbonic acid before it can enter seawater. A biographer of Suess later noted that, among the articles in the same journal, the Suess-Revelle piece was the only one to emphasize the growing quantities of fossil-fuel carbon and to flag the possibility of global warming over time. Revelle testified to Congress and told journalists that Earth was a spaceship endangered by rising seas and desertification. A November 1957 report in The Hammond Times described his research as suggesting that a large-scale global warming with radical climate changes might result. That report marked one of the earliest recorded uses of the term "global warming."

• 5. Building UCSD

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  During the late 1950s, Revelle fought to create a University of California campus in San Diego at a time when the UC Board of Regents would have preferred simply expanding UCLA. San Diego politicians and businesspeople pushed for a site near downtown, close to San Diego State University or in Balboa Park. Revelle pushed back. The decision to build at La Jolla came in 1959. The first graduate students enrolled in 1960, followed by undergraduates in 1964.

  Acquiring land was a contest. Revelle competed with Jonas Salk for terrain on the Torrey Pines site and lost some of what he later called the "best piece of land we had" to the fledgling Salk Institute. His feelings about Salk did not soften. In later years he referred to Salk as a folk hero who was "not very bright."

  Revelle also confronted La Jolla's antisemitic property restrictions. Real estate covenants in the community refused to allow Jewish residents, which affected Scripps professors. Revelle helped found a new housing subdivision partly so that those professors would have somewhere to live. His combative approach to these fights made him enemies who described him to the Board of Regents as too disorganized to run a university. UC President Clark Kerr concluded that Revelle could not serve as UCSD's first chancellor and delivered that news to what Kerr described as a "heartbroken" Revelle. Kerr later recalled in his memoirs that Revelle had spoken of walking the prospective campus on moonlit nights, visualizing what might rise there. Herbert York became UCSD's first chancellor instead.

  Revelle left Scripps in 1963 and founded the Center for Population Studies at Harvard, where he spent more than ten years directing research on science, technology, and world hunger. He returned to UC San Diego in 1976 as a professor in the political science department. The first college of UC San Diego bears his name.

• 6. A Name Pulled Into Politics

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  Roger Revelle died in San Diego on the 15th of July 1991, from complications of cardiac arrest. Before that year was out, his name was pulled into one of the sharpest political disputes of the early climate debate. An article appeared under his name as co-author in the publication Cosmos: A Journal of Emerging Issues, alongside physicist S. Fred Singer and electrical engineer Chauncey Starr. The article, titled "What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap," argued against drastic immediate action on climate change and concluded that the scientific base for greenhouse warming was "too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time."

  The bulk of the article, including the title, had been written and published a year earlier by Singer alone. Justin Lancaster, who had been Revelle's graduate student and teaching assistant at Scripps from 1981 until Revelle's death, said that Revelle was "hoodwinked" by Singer and was "intensely embarrassed" that his name appeared on the piece. In 1992, Lancaster accused Singer of acting to undercut then-Senator Al Gore's climate policy positions. Singer sued Lancaster, with support from the Center for Public Interest in Washington, D.C. To end the lawsuit, Lancaster gave Singer a statement of apology but refused to agree that anything he had said was false. In 2006, Lancaster formally withdrew even that partial retraction and repeated his original charges.

  The controversy spread fast. When Gore was a vice-presidential candidate in 1992, The New Republic compared the references to Revelle in Gore's book Earth in the Balance with the views in the Cosmos article. Newsweek followed. Patrick Michaels noted that the article had been read into the Congressional Record. The matter reached the televised vice-presidential debate, where Admiral James Stockdale raised it. Gore replied that Revelle's views had been taken out of context. Revelle's daughter Carolyn wrote publicly that her father had remained deeply concerned about global warming until his death and that his call for caution against "drastic" action meant measures that would cost trillions of dollars, not an endorsement of inaction.

• 7. Legacy in Science and Institutions

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  In 1986, Revelle received the Balzan Prize for Oceanography and Climatology. A 1990 heart attack forced him to move his UCSD seminar on Marine Policy from the Revelle College provost's office to the Scripps Institution, where he continued teaching until the end of his life. His 1991 National Medal of Science came from President George H. W. Bush, one of roughly 500 such awards given across the entire twentieth century.

  The honors that followed his death trace the breadth of what he set in motion. A new Scripps research vessel was named the R/V Roger Revelle. The Ocean Studies Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine established the Roger Revelle Commemorative Lecture series in 1999 to connect ocean science and public policy. Since 1992, the American Geophysical Union has given the Roger Revelle Medal each year for outstanding work in atmospheric sciences, atmosphere-ocean coupling, atmosphere-land coupling, biogeochemical cycles, climate, or related aspects of the Earth system. The Revelle factor, the measure of the ocean's resistance to absorbing carbon dioxide that he and Suess identified, remains a standard term in climate science. In his November 1982 letter to Scientific American, Revelle had written that a warming signal exceeding the noise level of natural climate variation should, if the models were correct, become detectable within ten to fifteen years. That prediction proved accurate.