Roger Revelle

Roger Randall Dougan Revelle (March 7, 1909 – July 15, 1991) was a scientist and scholar who was instrumental in the formative years of the University of California, San Diego and was among the early scientists to study anthropogenic global warming, as well as the movement of Earth's tectonic plates.

UC San Diego's first college is named Revelle College in his honor.

Roger Revelle was born in Seattle to William Roger Revelle and Ella Dougan.

He grew up in southern California.

After graduating from Pomona College in 1929 with early studies in geology, he earned a PhD in oceanography from the University of California, Berkeley in 1936.

While at Cal, he studied under George Louderback and was initiated into Theta Tau Professional Engineering Fraternity, which started as a mining engineering fraternity and maintained a strong affinity for geology and geological engineering students.

Much of his early work in oceanography took place at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in San Diego.

He was also oceanographer for the Navy during WWII.

Working for the Navy in the late 1940s, he helped to determine which projects gained funding.

He also promoted the idea that the Navy ought to support "basic research" instead of only trying to build new technology.

He was director of SIO from 1950 to 1964.

He stood against the UC faculty being required to take an anti-communist oath during the Joseph McCarthy period.

At Scripps he launched several major long-range expeditions in the 1950s, including the MIDPAC, TRANSPAC (with Canada and Japan), EQUAPAC, and NORPAC, each traversing a different part of the Pacific Ocean.

He and other scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography helped the U.S. government to plan nuclear weapons tests, in the hope that oceanographers might make use of the data.

During the late 1950s, Revelle fought for the establishment of a University of California campus in San Diego.

He had to contend with the UC Board of Regents, who would have preferred merely to expand the University of California, Los Angeles campus rather than create an entirely new campus in San Diego.

He also came into conflict with San Diego politicians and businessmen who believed that the campus should be established closer to downtown, such as near San Diego State University or in Balboa Park.

In 1952, along with Dr. Seibert Q. Duntley, he successfully moved the MIT Visibility Lab to SIO with financial support of the U.S. Navy.

Along with oceanographers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Revelle planned the American contributions to the oceanographic program of the International Geophysical Year (IGY).

Revelle was one of the committee chairmen in the influential National Academy of Sciences studies of the biological effects of atomic radiation (BEAR), the results of which were published in 1956.

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, and in Antarctica.

Hans Suess was recruited by Revelle, and they co-authored a 1957 article 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 the assumption made by early geoscientists (Chamberlin, Arhenius and Callendar) that it would simply accumulate in the upper atmosphere to "lower the mean level of back radiation in the infrared and thereby increase the average temperature near the Earth's surface".

There had been little sign to date of this greenhouse effect causing the anticipated warming, but the Suess–Revelle article suggested that increasing human gas emissions might change this.

They said 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".

Revelle told journalists about the issues and testified to Congress that "The Earth itself is a space ship", 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 may result" – the first use of the term global warming.

A biographer of Suess later said that, although other articles in the same journal discussed carbon-dioxide levels, the Suess–Revelle article was "the only one of the three to stress the growing quantity of 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 one of the components of carbonic acid: carbonate ion, bicarbonate ion, or protonated carbonic acid, 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, geochemistry, 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.

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 Scientific Committee on Ocean Research (SCOR) and the International Oceanic Commission (IOC).

During planning for the IGY, under Revelle's directorship, SIO participated in and later became the principal center for the Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Program.

The decision to build the campus at La Jolla was made in 1959, and the first graduate students were enrolled in 1960, followed by the first undergraduates in 1964.

Revelle's struggle to acquire land for the new campus put him in competition with Jonas Salk, and Revelle lost some of what he called the "best piece of land we had" on UCSD's eventual Torrey Pines site to the fledgling Salk Institute.

In later years Revelle continued to show some animosity toward Salk, once saying: "He is a folk hero, even though he is... not very bright."

He served as Science Advisor to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall during the Kennedy Administration in the early 1960s and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1974).

Revelle was deeply involved in the growth of oceanography in the United States and internationally after World War II.

He became the first president of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research, an international group of scientists devoted to advising on international projects, and was a frequent adviser to the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, created in 1960.

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."