The Geophysical Experiment
73 “Is Climate Changing?”: The New York Times, “Is Climate Changing?”, October 15, 1950.
“The world’s glaciers also seem to support the warming-up theory. Wherever they have been studied it has been found that they have been receding since 1850, with an increase in the rate since 1920.”
73 “Is the Climate Changing?”: The New York Times, “Is The Climate Changing?”, July 22, 1951.
73 “No, The Weather Isn’t Changing”: Jerome Namias, “No, The Weather Isn’t Changing,” The New York Times, October 21, 1951.
73 “Our Changing Climate”: The New York Times, “Our Changing Climate,” October 10, 1952.
73 “Oldtimers May Be Right”: Waldemar Kaempffert, “Oldtimers May Be Right When They Tell Us That the Climate Is Getting Warmer,” The New York Times, November 30, 1952.
73 “How Industry May Change Climate”: Waldemar Kaempffert, “How Industry May Change Climate,” The New York Times, May 24, 1953.
73 “The Weather Is Really Changing”: Leonard Engel, “The Weather Is Really Changing,” The New York Times, July 12, 1953.
Summers have become warmer, but the most striking changes have been in winters. Fifty years ago, a horse and carriage could be driven for several weeks each winter across the Hudson River between Nyack and Tarrytown; iceboating was a favorite sport. The last of the iceboating clubs there is long since gone. In the Alps, in Greenland, in Alaska, winters are no longer long or severe enough to make up for summer melting of the glaciers, and nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat.
73 up 50 percent over two decades: Herbert Brean, “Our New Weather,” Life Magazine, August 27, 1956.
73 In 1916, the Weather Bureau: Brean, “Our New Weather,” Life.
Atlanta Daily World, “Hurricanes, Storms Reflect World Climate, Experts Say,” September 1, 1956.
73 “a year for tornadoes”: Leonard Engel, “The Weather Is Really Changing,” The New York Times, July 12, 1953. This was, per the newspaper, “more than have ever been reported before and three times as many as usual.”
73 Four years later: Two years later, spotters reported 870 tornadoes. Brean, “Our New Weather,” Life.
73 230 in May alone: George H. T. Kimble, “Why the Weird Weather,” The New York Times, October 26, 1958.
Take the matter of record-breaking. Last year saw more than a score of long-standing records broken in this country alone. More tornadoes (230) were reported in May of that year than in any previous month for which the United States Weather Bureau has records.
The tornado year was a record breaker, too: 924. “The total for year (924) was the highest ever.” Kimble, “Why the Weird Weather,” New York Times.
This story, of course, included the CO2 material.
In their search for alternative or supplementary answers, some scientists have been examining the effect on the atmosphere of the daily growing carbon dioxide content. Until the internal combustion era, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere remained fairly steady. Now [there] is probably between 15 and 20 per cent more CO2 in the atmosphere than there was at the beginning of the century.
73 Sixty Mays later: Reuters, “Tornadoes rip through Kansas after one killed, scores hurt by Ohio twisters,” May 28, 2019.
The final tally ended up at 510, still the largest monthly (by 100 additional funnels) ever reported.
Bob Henson, “Climate Change And Tornadoes: Any Connection? As Greenhouse Gases Shuffle The Atmospheric Deck, Where And When Twisters Happen Is Changing,” Yale Climate Connections, July 19, 2021.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/07/climate-change-and-tornadoes-any-connection/
Accessed 8-28-22.
73 In Libya, the desert summer: George H. T. Kimble, “Why the Weird Weather,” The New York Times, October 26, 1958.
It is perhaps the “spread’ of these reports of unusual weather that constitutes the strongest ground for believing them to be justified. Small-scale aberrations have always been, as far as we know, a feature of the weather of our world, for, sturdily built and orderly though it is, the atmosphere is habitually in a state of unrest. However, reports of aberrations are now coming in not only from tropical Africa and the United States but from Europe, Australia, Asia and South America as well.
74 In 1956, Life magazine: Herbert Brean, “Our New Weather,” Life, August 27, 1956.
74 “Who’s right?”: Herbert Brean, “Our New Weather,” Life Magazine, August 27, 1956.
74 “I would estimate that”: Lloyd Norman, “Fumes Seen Warming Arctic Seas,” The Washington Post, March 19, 1956.
74 Gilbert Plass: Fleming, Historical Perspectives, Chapter Nine, “Global Warming? The Early Twentieth Century,” 114.
James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives in Climate Change, Oxford University Press 1998. Chapter Six, “John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius and Early Research on Carbon Dioxide and Climate,” 66.
74 under auspices of the military: Waldemar Kaempffert, “Science In Review: Warmer Climate on the Earth May Be Due To More Carbon Dioxide In the Air,” The New York Times, October 28, 1956.
74 “measurements show”: Gilbert N. Plass, “Effect of Carbon Dioxide Variations on Climate,” American Journal of Physics 24, 1956.
74 “the familiar greenhouse analogy”: Waldemar Kaempffert, “Science In Review: Warmer Climate on the Earth May Be Due To More Carbon Dioxide In the Air,” The New York Times, October 28, 1956.
74 Picturing solutions was tougher: The Times had to explain, “carbon dioxide (the gas that fizzes in ginger ale)”. That is, still a soda machine.
And when Plass gave his doubling estimate, it was essentially Arrhenius and his Worlds in the Making 4° C.
“According to Dr. Plass, the latest calculations indicate that if the carbon dioxide content of the earth were doubled the surface temperature would rise 3.6° C. and that if the amount were reduced by half the surface temperature would fall 3.8° C.”
74 “The introduction of nuclear energy”: Kaempffert, “Science In Review: Warmer Climate on the Earth May Be Due,” New York Times.
75 The Cold War rediscovered global warming: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, Harvard University Press 2003, Chapter Two, “Discovering A Possibility,” 30-1.
It was also a historical accident that military agencies were scattering money with a free hand in the 1950s. Without the Cold War there would have been little funding for the research that turned out to illuminate the CO2 greenhouse effect, a subject nobody had connected with practical affairs. The U.S. Navy had bought an answer to a question it had never thought to ask.
75 the big sink Arrhenius relied on: S. George Philander, Ed., The Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change, Second Edition, “Svante August Arrhenius,” Ingrid Hartmann, University of Hohenheim, Sage Reference 2012. 80.
The oceans would absorb any extra CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, and any remainder would be absorbed by plant life, leading to a lusher landscape, skeptics argued.
75 The ocean: Weart, in his online incarnation.
In the mid 1950s, not many scientists were concerned that humanity was adding carbon dioxide gas (CO2) to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. The suggestion that this would change the climate had been abandoned decades earlier by nearly everyone. A particularly simple and powerful argument was that the added gas would not linger in the air. Most of the CO2 on the surface of the planet was not in the tenuous atmosphere, but dissolved in the huge mass of water in the oceans. Obviously, no matter how much more gas human activities might pour into the atmosphere, nearly all of it would wind up safely buried in the ocean depths.
Spencer Weart, “Roger Revelle’s Discovery,” The Discovery of Global Warming, American Institute of Physics.
https://history.aip.org/climate/Revelle.htm
Accessed 9-15-22.
75 Congressman Dana Rohrabacher: Sharon Begley, “The Truth About Denial,” Newsweek, August 13, 2007. Aaron Rupar, “Rep. Rohrabacher: Global Warming May Have Been Caused By ‘Dinosaur Flatulence’,” Think Progress, February 10, 2007.
Accessed 9-15-22.
75 “grandiose”: To E. B. White, in a 1956 New Yorker essay, egotism ran the other way. Politicians made it sound as if people could “damn well rise above planetary considerations, as though we were greater than our environment, as though the national verve somehow transcended the world.”
E. B. White, “Letter From the East,” The New Yorker, November 3, 1956. This observation has seemed especially pointed in the math and aftermath of these Covid years.
I should add, too: White’s most famous collection, which began as a series of Harper’s essays, is called One Man’s Meat. A title I never understood—until researching the denier S. Fred Singer, for a terrible portion of this story, I came upon the adage’s second half: ...is another man’s poison. Thus does commonly acknowledged wisdom surrender and recover its significance through the ages. A similar misunderstanding around the playful caution curiosity killed the cat. The forgotten second half reverses its meaning: ...but satisfaction brought it back.
75 Bikini Atoll: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, Harvard University Press 2003. Chapter Two, “Discovering A Possibility,” 28.
76 he’d teach at Harvard: Melinda Henneberger, “On Campus Torn By 60’s, Agonizing Over The Path; Al Gore’s Journey: A Character Test At Harvard,” The New York Times, June 21, 2000.
His appreciation of science really exploded in his senior year, when Mr. Gore also got to know Roger Revelle, the oceanographer who did much of the pioneering work on the greenhouse effect and global warming—a major focus of Mr. Gore’s 1992 environmental tome, ‘‘Earth in the Balance.’’ When Mr. Revelle shared his research with the students, Mr. Gore was hooked.
‘‘It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates,’’ Mr. Gore said. ‘‘Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!’’
76 he died a year later: Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt, Bloomsbury, 2010. Chapter Six, “The Denial of Global Warming,” 193-7.
76 navy began to flirt with oceanography: Time, “Ocean Frontier,” July 6, 1959.
76 saved the navy millions on fuel: Per Time, it cut those costs ten percent.
The device was the bathythermograph, and its first uses would make for an amazing movie sequence.
The sound waves were bent by this temperature gradient, hiding a sub as effectively as if it were behind a hill. Equipped with a gadget of Woods Hole’s devising, a bathythermograph, many a U.S. sub saved itself during World War II by finding a temperature “hill” in the ocean and slipping behind it.
76 the big spender: This is the ONR, the Office of Naval Research. See the online, augmented version of Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming.
Spencer Weart, “Roger Revelle’s Discovery,” The Discovery of Global Warming, American Institute of Physics.
https://history.aip.org/climate/Revelle.htm
Accessed 9-15-22.
76 tossing money in every research direction: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, Harvard University Press 2003, Chapter Two, “Discovering A Possibility,” 30. “It was also a historical accident that military agencies were scattering money with a free hand in the 1950s . . .”
76 Suddenly, no diner in Japan: Spencer Weart, “Roger Revelle’s Discovery,” The Discovery of Global Warming, American Institute of Physics.
https://history.aip.org/climate/Revelle.htm
Accessed 9-15-22.
“There was a more immediate problem,” the historian writes. “In 1954, fallout from an American thermonuclear test injured the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel. The entire Japanese nation became panicky about the safety of eating fish from the Pacific Ocean.”
The irradiated boat had the hauntingly ironic name Lucky Dragon.
Things interconnect. The irradiated boat set off a chain of anxieties and associations resulting in the first Godzilla (1954). And all the Kaiju films that thunderously followed. Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that’s there at the back with warming, too.
David Ropiek, “How the Unlucky Lucky Dragon Birthed An Era of Nuclear Fear,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 28, 2018.
https://thebulletin.org/2018/02/how-the-unlucky-lucky-dragon-birthed-an-era-of-nuclear-fear/
Accessed 9-15-22.
(You could also draw a line forward: from Gojira and Tokyo to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, and thus to Crichton contesting global warming in his 2005 State of Fear; which President George Bush so thoroughly enjoyed—a reading experience that let him off the hook—he summoned its author to the White House.)
76 how it greeted any change quickly and allergically: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, Harvard University Press 2003, Chapter Two, “Discovering A Possibility,” 28-9.
77 greeted any change quickly and allergically: Wallace Broecker, Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat—and How To Counter It, Hill and Wang | Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008. Chapter Five, “Carbon Dioxide and the Keeling Curve,” 70.
77 evaporate it right back out again: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, Harvard University Press 2003, Chapter Two, “Discovering A Possibility,” 29.
77 what earlier scientists had anticipated: Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, 29.
While it was true that most of the CO2 molecules added to the atmosphere would wind up in ocean surface water within a few years, most of those molecules (or others already in the oceans) would promptly be evaporated. Revelle calculated that in sum, the ocean surface could not really absorb that much gas—barely one-tenth the amount earlier calculations had predicted.
As Weart adds in his book’s augmented, online version, this suggested “80% of the CO2 added to the atmosphere [would] stay there.”
Spencer Weart, “Roger Revelle’s Discovery,” The Discovery of Global Warming, American Institute of Physics.
https://history.aip.org/climate/Revelle.htm
Accessed 9-15-22.
The presentation from Bill McKibben’s End of Nature sticks in the mind. “What they found was dismaying. No, more than dismaying,” McKibben writes. “What they found may turn out to be the single most important limit in an age of limits, the central awkward fact of a hot and constrained planet.”
McKibben continues, “What they found was that the conventional wisdom was wrong: the upper layer of the oceans, where air and sea meet and transact their business, would absorb very little of the excess carbon dioxide produced by man.” Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, Random House 1989. Chapter One, “A New Atmosphere,” 9.
77 the new data: All this, in fact, makes Revelle and Suess’ famous paper bipolar.
“Most of the text,” Weart writes, “he left as it was, reflecting the pair’s original belief that the oceans were absorbing most of the new CO2. A few extra sentences explained that this would not happen after all.” Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, 29.
77 scotch-taped: Which represents some ingenious Sherlock Holmes work on the part of Spencer Weart. This is from a footnote. Here we see the historian of climate acting as text detective:
In Revelle’s own paper with Suess, the bulk of the text reflected the pair’s original belief that the oceans were absorbing most of the new CO2. The key paragraph, the one that said seawater needed to absorb only about a tenth as much gas as a simple-minded calculation supposed, stood apart like an isolated thought. In the archives, it is visibly an addition, Scotch-taped onto the original draft.
. . . The incongruity of the paragraph had already been clear to me on repeated readings of the published paper, but it was gratifying confirmation to find the paragraph (and the caption for figure 2) typed on a different kind of paper and taped onto the original version.
Spencer Weart, “Roger Revelle’s Discovery,” The Discovery of Global Warming, American Institute of Physics.
https://history.aip.org/climate/Revelle.htm
Accessed 9-15-22.
77 most famous sentence: Weart reports, “This sentence . . . has since been quoted more than any other statement in the history of global warming.”
Spencer Weart, “Roger Revelle’s Discovery,” The Discovery of Global Warming, American Institute of Physics.
https://history.aip.org/climate/Revelle.htm
Accessed 9-15-22.
77 in warming science: In Fixing Climate, famed oceanographer Wallace Broecker calls the phrase a mantra. “Their most remarkable insight has been quoted so often it’s become a kind of mantra of the global warming age.” Wallace Broecker, Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal About the Current Threat—and How To Counter It, Hill and Wang | Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2008. Chapter Five, “Carbon Dioxide and the Keeling Curve,” 68, 69.
77 “Human beings are now carrying out”: Roger Revelle, Hans E. Suess, “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of An Increase of Atmospheric CO2 during the Past Decades,” Tellus IX (1957), I.
The taped-in part falls on page 19 of the Tellus issue.
77 He published in 1957: Interestingly—and this shows the power of the hobbyist’s work; without his spur, whatever sort of intellectual irritant he represented, Revelle might not have undertaken his research—the piece begins as a kind of response to G.S. Callendar.
And the Tellus piece’s notes are a kind of cocktail party of scientists we’ve met so far. You bump back into Plass, Callendar, Arrhenius.
77 “it was as if someone had”: McKibben, End of Nature, 11.
78 “morbid dispassion”: Bill McKibben, “The End of Nature: The Greenhouse Experiment,” The New Yorker, September 11, 1989.
Reprinted in The Bill McKibben Reader: Pieces From an Active Life, Henry Holt 2008. 59.
78 “a sixteen-fold increase”: Weart, Discovery of Global Warming, 29.
78 “scientific romancers”: The New York Times, “Is The Climate Changing?”, July 22, 1951.
78 admiring Times profile: William K. Stevens, “Iconoclastic Guru of the Climate Debate: Wallace S. Broecker,” The New York Times, March 17, 1998.
79 “laughably rigged” and “ludicrous”: Bruce Barcott, “State of Fear: Not So Hot,” The New York Times, January 30, 2005. “Global warming,” Crichton sets out to prove, “is a scientific delusion.”
79 “a science-fiction fabulist”: Jeffrey Kluger, “What Now For Our Feverish Planet?”, Time, March 29, 2007.
79 in thirty years: The New York Times, “Science Notes: Carbon Dioxide Due To Change Climate,” June 3, 1956.
79 “some effects should be felt by 1990”: Philip Shabecoff, “Increase of Carbon Dioxide in Air Alarms Scientists,” The New York Times New York Times, June 9, 1979.
79 “If you said, ‘Let’s design a problem’”: Michael D. Lemonick, “Heading For Apocalypse?”, Time, October 02, 1995.
