The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World

by Daniel Yergin

  Revelle organized and led historic expeditions after World War II that sailed for months and months into the then-unknown waters of the Mid- and South Pacific, exploring some of the deepest waters in the world. He recalled those expeditions as “one of the greatest periods of exploration of the earth . . . Every time you went to sea, you made unexpected discoveries. It was revolutionary. Nothing that we expected was true. Everything we didn’t expect was true.” At the time, most geological textbooks said that the deep-sea floor was a “flat and featureless plain.” Instead Revelle and his fellow explorers found deep trenches in the sea floor and identified the huge, heretofore unknown deep-sea Mid-Pacific Mountain Range. These discoveries were critical to the nowdominant plate tectonics theory of the movement of the continents and the earth’s surface. Revelle was the driving force in the establishment of the University of California at San Diego. At the same time, he helped build the cultural life of San Diego. For, he asked, how could first-rate academics be attracted to a city whose “best-known cultural attraction” was a zoo? He went on to help shape the field of population studies and worked on economic development in the third world.

  Amid all of this he also launched the modern study of climate change.

  What first caught Revelle’s interest in CO2 was something that he had learned as an undergraduate at Pomona College—that the oceans contained 60 times more CO2 than the atmosphere. His 1936 Ph.D. argued that the ocean absorbed most of the CO2 that came from people burning fuel. Accordingly, human activity that released carbon would have very little, if any effect at all, on climate because the ocean, as a giant sink, would capture most of it. That was the dominant view over the next several decades.4

  “A LARGE-SCALE GEOPHYSICAL EXPERIMENT”

  Over the years, Revelle had given some intermittent thought to the Callendar Effect—the argument made by Guy Callendar that increasing CO2 concentrations would raise the earth’s temperatures. His response, based upon his own research going back to his Ph.D., was that Callendar was probably wrong, that Callendar didn’t understand that the ocean would absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. But by the mid-1950s Revelle was beginning to change his mind. The reason emerged from his research on nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific.

  After World War II, the Navy enlisted Revelle to help understand the oceanographic effects of those tests. Revelle’s assignment was to devise techniques to measure the waves and water pressure from the explosions. This would enable him to track radioactive diffusion through ocean currents. In the course of this work, Revelle’s team discovered “sharp, sudden” variations in water temperatures at different depths. This was the startling insight—the ocean worked differently from what they had thought. In Revelle’s words, the ocean was “a deck of cards.” Revelle concluded that “the ocean is stratified with a lid of warm water on the cold, and the mixing between them is limited.” That constrained the ability of the ocean to accept CO2.5 It was this period, in the mid-1950s, that Revelle, collaborating with a colleague, Hans Suess, wrote an article that captured this insight and would turn out to be a landmark in climate thinking.

  The title made clear what the article was all about: “Carbon Dioxide Exchange Between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase in Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades.” Their paper invoked both Arrhenius and Callendar. Yet the article itself reflected ambiguity. Part of it suggested that the oceans would absorb most of the carbon, just as Revelle’s Ph.D. had argued, meaning that there would be no global warming triggered by carbon. Yet another paragraph suggested the opposite; that, while the ocean would absorb CO2, much of that was only on a temporary basis, owing to the chemistry of sea water, and the lack of interchange between warmer and cooler levels, and that the CO2 would seep back into the atmosphere. In other words, on a net basis, the ocean absorbed much less CO2 than expected. If not in the ocean, there was only one place for the carbon to go, and that was back into the atmosphere. That meant that atmospheric concentration of CO2 was destined, inevitably, to rise. The latter assertion was a late addition by Revelle, literally typed on a different kind of paper and then taped onto the original manuscript.

  Before sending off the article, Revelle appended a further last-minute thought: The buildup of CO2 “may become significant during future decades if industrial fuel combustion continues to rise exponentially,” he wrote. “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.” This last sentence would reverberate down through the years in ways that Revelle could not have imagined. Indeed, it would go on to achieve prophetic status—“quoted more than any other statement in the history of global warming.”6

  Yet it was less a warning and more like a reflection. For Revelle was not worried. Like Svante Arrhenius who had tried 60 years earlier to quantify the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere, Revelle did not foresee that increased concentrations would be dangerous. Rather, it was a very interesting scientific question. “Roger wasn’t alarmed at all,” recalled one of his colleagues. “He liked great geophysical experiments. He thought that this would be a grand experiment . . . to study the effect on the ocean of the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the mixing between the ocean reservoirs.” (Even a decade later, in 1966, Revelle was arguing that “our attitude” toward rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “brought about by our own actions should probably contain more curiosity than apprehension.”)7

  At the time, Revelle was deeply involved in planning for an unprecedented global study of how the earth worked that might answer some of the climate questions. This was the IGY—the International Geophysical Year.8

  THE UNEXPECTED IMPACT OF THE INTERNATIONAL GEOPHYSICAL YEAR

  The International Geophysical Year (IGY) was born out of the idea of using the new technological capabilities stimulated in World War II and after—ranging from rockets and radar to the first computers—to explore heretofore inaccessible places where “metal loses its strength, rubber breaks, and diesel fluid becomes viscous like honey,” and thus generate much greater, deeper insight into how the earth worked and its interaction with the sun. It bloomed into a cross-disciplinary network of several thousand scientists from more than 70 countries. The earth’s processes—from its core and the seabed floor to the outer reaches of the atmosphere—would be mapped and measured in thousands of experiments coordinated on a global basis and conducted in a much more sophisticated and consistent way than ever before. Some of these experiments would involve Herculean physical feats of technology and endurance.9

  The IGY was a sort of extended leap year, for it actually ran from July 1957 through December 1958, a period chosen to coincide with a fever point of solar activity. This global exploration brought forth an extraordinary body of new knowledge on everything from the flows of the deep waters of the oceans and the nature of the sea floor to the intense high-altitude radiation that girdles the earth. Glaciers constituted one of the major topics, continuing the fascination they held for scientists going back to Saussure and Tyndall.

  “OKAY, LET’S GO”: THE STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF WEATHER

  Then there was the weather. The IGY brought an unprecedented concentration of scientific talent to bear on better understanding weather. In addition to scientific curiosity there were also important strategic considerations. The Second World War had scarcely ended a decade earlier, and time again during that conflict, weather had proved of decisive importance on the battlefield. In western Russia, winter’s icy grip—what Russians called General Winter—decimated the Nazi armies as they besieged Leningrad and assaulted Stalingrad.

  But nothing had so forcefully underlined the strategic importance of better comprehension of the weather than D-Day, the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The “Longest Day,” as it was called, had been preceded by the “longest hours”—hours and hours of soul-wrenching stress, uncertainty, and fear in the headquarters along the southern coast of England, as inde
cisive hourly briefings followed indecisive hourly briefings, with the “go/no go” decision held hostage to a single factor: the weather.

  “The weather in this country is practically unpredictable,” the commander in chief Dwight Eisenhower had complained while anxiously waiting for the next briefing. The forecasts were for very bad weather. How could 175,000 men be put at risk in such dreadful circumstances? At best, the reliability of the weather forecasts went out no more than two days; the stormy weather over the English Channel reduced the reliability to 12 hours. So uncertain was the weather that at the last moment the invasion scheduled for June 5 was postponed, and ships that had already set sail were called back just in time before the Germans could detect them.

  Finally, on the morning of June 5, the chief meteorologist said, “I’ll give you some good news.” The forecasts indicated that a brief break of sorts in the weather was at hand. Eisenhower sat silently for 30 or 40 seconds, in his mind balancing success against failure and the risk of making a bad decision. Finally, he stood up and gave the order, “Okay, let’s go.” With that was launched into the barely marginal weather of June 6, 1944, the greatest armada in the history of the world. Fortunately, the German weather forecasters did not see the break and assured the German commander, Erwin Rommel, that he did not have to worry about an invasion.10

  A decade later, knowing better than anyone else the strategic importance of improved weather knowledge, Eisenhower, now president, gave the “let’s go” order for the International Geophysical Year.

  The IGY was designed to deepen knowledge not only about weather but also climate. As Roger Revelle wrote, among the “main objectives of the International Geophysical Year” was to gain a deeper understanding of climate change—what had triggered the coming and retreat of the Ice Age, that “dark age of snow and ice”—and the ability to predict future climate change.

  Researchers did indeed discover and confirm some of the planet’s most important regulatory cycles that affected climate, including the impact of ocean and air currents in transmitting heat. But other elements also shaped the climactic system, including, some suspected, greenhouse gases. One of the organizers speculated that the earth might be “approaching a man-made warm period, simply because we are belching carbon dioxide into the air from our factories at a present rate of several billion tons a year!”11

  THE MEETING AT WOODS HOLE

  Roger Revelle, who headed the oceanography panel for the IGY, wanted to make sure the impact of carbon dioxide was, in his words, “adequately documented in the course of the IGY.” With that in mind, Revelle sat down with three other scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, to plot out a global research agenda for part of the IGY. Gustaf Arrhenius, the grandson of the Swedish Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius, remembered this discussion at Woods Hole as “an historic event when we got together.” They decided that one of the objectives of the International Geophysical Year should be to actually measure what Arrhenius’s grandfather had tried to calculate more than half a century earlier—the impact of CO2 on the atmosphere.12

  But was it possible to get decent readings of CO2? Someone at that Woods Hole meeting had heard about “a promising young man,” a researcher at the California Institute of Technology who was working on measuring CO2. Perhaps they could get him to Scripps.

  KEELING AND HIS CURVE

  The one thing that Charles David Keeling did not want to study was economics. His father was an economist, he had grown up in a household in which economics was a constant topic, and he would go to great lengths to avoid studying economics. At the University of Illinois he dropped his chemistry major because it had an economics requirement and ended up majoring in liberal arts. Still, he managed to get himself into the Ph.D. program in chemistry at Northwestern. While laboring away on his chemistry he came across a book, Glacial Geolog y and the Pleistocene Epoch, that had a major impact on him. “I imagined climbing mountains while measuring the physical properties of glaciers,” he recalled. As with John Tyndall, glaciers captivated him, and he spent a summer hiking and climbing in the “glacier-decked” Cascade Mountains of Washington State. He ended up supplementing his chemistry work with geology.13

  For his postdoctoral work, Keeling wanted to find a way to combine his love of chemistry and geology. A new geochemistry program at the California Institute of Technology provided the answer. He would focus on carbon. Using a device he designed, Keeling stationed himself atop one of the Caltech buildings and got busy measuring CO2 in the air. But local pollution made the readings highly erratic. Seeking purer air, Keeling decamped for the wild sea-swept beauty of Big Sur, along the Northern California coast. He loved being in the outdoors, he said, even if, in order to take measurements, “I had to get out of a sleeping bag several times a night.”14

  But Big Sur did not work either; CO2 levels in forests fluctuated through daily cycles. For a true reading on carbon dioxide levels, he needed to measure the levels with a stable “atmospheric background.” For that he needed funding.

  It was just about that time that Revelle reached out to Keeling and offered him a place at Scripps, along with research money. Revelle recognized that there was a certain risk but thought Keeling’s obsessiveness was a clear plus. “He wants, in his belly, to measure carbon dioxide, to measure it every possible way, and to understand everything there is to know about carbon dioxide,” Revelle was later to say. “But that’s all he’s interested in. He’s never been interested in anything else.”

  Keeling got to work, devoting all his scientific energies, as he put it, to “the pursuit of the carbon dioxide molecule in all its ramifications.” At that time it was all in the name of science. “There was no sense of peril then,” recalled Keeling. “Just a keen interest in gaining knowledge.”15

  The Weather Bureau provided Keeling with the “where”—its new meteorological observatory in Hawaii, 11,135 feet up, near the top of the volcanic peak Mauna Loa. Here was the pure air, untroubled either by urban pollution or the daily cycles of forest vegetation, that would provide the stable atmospheric background Keeling needed. Another of his measuring devices was dispatched to the Little America station in Antarctica.

  The cumulative results from the station atop Mauna Lao would prove something startling. In 1938 Guy Callendar may have been pooh-poohed by the professional meteorologists when he delivered his paper in London. But Keeling would prove him right. There really was a Callendar Effect. For, over the years, Keeling’s pioneering research established a clear trend: Atmospheric CO2 levels were increasing. In 1959 the average concentration was 316 parts per million. By 1970 it had risen to 325 parts per million, and by 1990 it would reach 354 parts. Fitted on a graph, this rising line became known as the Keeling Curve. Based upon the trend that Keeling had identified, the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would double around the middle of the twenty-first century. But what could increasing carbon mean for climate?

  The International Geophysical Year provided a kind of an answer, if at least by analogy. Until then the planet Venus had been the province of magazines like Astounding Science Fiction. But now scientists began to understand from the IGY study of Venus what the greenhouse effect could mean in its most extreme form. With higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere, the surface of Venus was hellishly hot, with temperatures as high as 870°F. Venus would eventually become a metaphor for climate change run amuck.16

  Year after year, Keeling pursued his measurements, working doggedly with his small team, improving the accuracy, meticulous in details, building up the register of atmospheric carbon. Revelle was to look back on Keeling’s work as “one of the most beautiful and important sets of geochemical measurements ever made, a beautiful record.” At Scripps, Keeling was known for his obsessional interest in his subject. Once the chemist Gustaf Arrhenius was rushing his pregnant wife, who was going into labor, to the hospital. Keeling flagged the car down on the Scripps campus and launched into an intricat
e discussion of some challenge of carbon dioxide measurement. Finally, after his wife signaled that she was not going to be able to hang on much longer, Arrhenius interrupted. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re going to have a baby now.” He added, “In a few minutes.” At that point, Keeling finally realized what was going on and waved them off.17

  Keeling’s work marked a great transition in climate science. Estimating carbon in the atmosphere was no longer a backward-looking matter aimed at explaining the mystery of the ice ages and the advance and retreat of glaciers in past millennia. It was instead becoming a subject about the future. By 1969 Keeling was confident enough to warn of risks from rising carbon. In 30 years, he said, “if present trends are any sign, mankind’s world, I judge, will be in greater immediate danger than it is today.”

  As a result of Charles Keeling’s work on atmospheric carbon, the littleknown Callendar Effect gave way to the highly influential Keeling Curve. Keeling’s work became the foundation for the modern debate over climate change and for the current drive to transform the energy system. Indeed, Keeling’s Curve became “the central icon of the greenhouse effect”—its likeness engraved into the wall of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.18