Roger Revelle

He entered Pomona College in 1925 meaning to be a journalist and left it a geologist. A research assistantship at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography followed in 1931, then a Berkeley doctorate in 1936, awarded for a study of bottom samples the research ship Carnegie had dredged off the floor of the Pacific. Born in Seattle and raised in Pasadena, he spent the war as a Navy commander running the oceanographic section of the Bureau of Ships. In 1946 he took 80 scientists and aides to Bikini atoll ahead of the atomic tests, sent to find out what a bomb would do to a lagoon. He came home holding a different question — where does anything put into the ocean actually go?

The 1957 paper with Hans Suess, in Tellus, carries the sentence that outlived everything else: human beings, they wrote, 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 finding underneath was the buffer factor, now called the Revelle factor. Bicarbonate chemistry limits how much carbon dioxide seawater can take up, so the ocean cannot simply swallow what industry emits. The rest stays in the air. Charles David Keeling was already hired to measure it, and the Mauna Loa record began in 1958.

Institutions were the other half of the work. He ran Scripps from 1950 to 1964, sent it across the Pacific, and fought the Regents, who would rather have enlarged UCLA, for a new campus in San Diego, built upward from graduate science instead of down from a freshman class. He also told a La Jolla whose agents refused to sell to Jews that it had to choose. You cannot have a university, he said, without Jewish professors. The campus took its first graduate students in 1960. He did not get to run it. Enemies told the Regents he was too disorganized, and Clark Kerr gave the chancellorship to Herbert York. He left in 1963 for Harvard, founded a centre on population and development, and worked on the salt ruining West Pakistan's fields and on food supply in the Ganges basin.

In 1991 an article under three names — S. Fred Singer, Revelle and Chauncey Starr — called the science too uncertain to justify drastic action. Singer had published most of it alone a year earlier. Justin Lancaster, his graduate student, said Revelle had been hoodwinked into lending his name and was embarrassed by it. Singer sued for defamation. Lancaster ended the suit with an apology, while refusing to say that anything he had said was false, then withdrew the retraction in 2006, saying he had signed under duress. The article was read into the Congressional Record and used against Al Gore, who calls Revelle the teacher who introduced him to the subject. Revelle died in San Diego on July 15, 1991.

Roger Revelle's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean article
  With Hans Suess, in Tellus — the large scale geophysical experiment paper 1957
• The buffer factor, now the Revelle factor discovery
  Seawater chemistry limits how much carbon dioxide the surface ocean can absorb 1957
• Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Program at Scripps other
  The program that put Charles David Keeling on Mauna Loa 1956
• University of California, San Diego other
  Built around graduate science, at a site he fought the Regents to get 1960
• Report on waterlogging and salinity in West Pakistan other
  White House and Interior panel he chaired — tube wells to pull down the water table 1962
• Restoring the Quality of Our Environment other
  Presidential science panel report — the first US government document to name fossil fuel carbon dioxide as a problem 1965

• 1929 aged ~20 Graduates from Pomona College, having switched from journalism to geology
• 1936 aged ~27 Takes a Berkeley doctorate for a study of Pacific bottom samples The material had been dredged up by the research ship Carnegie.
• 1946 aged ~37 Leads the oceanographic section at the Bikini atomic tests Eighty scientists and aides, sent to learn what a bomb does to a lagoon.
• 1950 aged ~41 Becomes director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
• 1957 aged ~48 Publishes the Tellus paper with Hans Suess Humanity, they wrote, was running a geophysical experiment that could not be repeated.
• March 1958 aged 48 The Mauna Loa carbon dioxide record begins Measured by Charles David Keeling, whom Revelle had hired in 1956.
• 1961 aged ~52 Passed over for the chancellorship of the campus he had fought for Herbert York got the job. Clark Kerr delivered the news himself.
• 1963 aged ~54 Leaves Scripps for Harvard and a new centre on population More than a decade there, mostly on water, land and world hunger.
• July 15, 1991 aged 82 Dies in San Diego of complications of cardiac arrest

• Charles David Keeling 1928–2005
  Measured atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa from 1958 until his death, producing the Keeling Curve. hired
• Harold Urey 1893–1981
  Discovered deuterium and founded cosmochemistry recruited to San Diego
• Al Gore b. 1948
  Vice president and 2000 presidential candidate who became a leading advocate for climate policy. taught
• James Hansen b. 1941
  The NASA climate scientist who told the Senate in 1988 that global warming had begun carried the question forward
• Rachel Carson 1907–1964
  Marine biologist whose book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. contemporary
• Clark Kerr 1911–2003
  Architect of California's 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education passed over by