How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
In 1965, the President’s Science Advisory Committee asked Roger Revelle, then director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, to write a summary of the potential impacts of carbon dioxide-induced warming. Revelle had been interested in global climate for some time, and in the late 1950S had obtained funding for his colleague, chemist Charles David Keeling, to measure CO2 systematically. (This work would produce the Keeling curve—showing CO2’s steady increase over time—for which Keeling would win the National Medal of Science and be made famous by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth.) Revelle knew that there was a lot about the problem that wasn’t well understood, so he focused his essay on the impact he considered most certain: sea level rise.7 He also made a forecast:”By the year 2000 there will be about 25% more CO2 in our atmosphere than at present [and] this will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate … could occur.”8
The report made it to the Office of the President, and Lyndon Johnson mentioned it in a Special Message to Congress later that year. “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuel.”9 But with the war in Vietnam going badly, civil rights workers being murdered in Mississippi, and the surgeon general declaring that smoking was hazardous to your health, Johnson had more pressing things to worry about. Nor was it easy to get Richard Nixon’s focus a few years later. Nixon undertook a number of important environmentally oriented reforms, including creating the Environmental Protection Agency, but during his administration climate concerns were focused on the SST project and the potential climate impact of its water vapor emissions, not CO2.
Yet, while CO2 didn’t get much attention in the 1970S, climate did, as drought-related famines in Africa and Asia drew attention to the vulnerability of world food supplies. The Soviet Union had a series of crop failures that forced the humiliated nation to buy grain on the world market, and six African nations south of the Sahel (the semi-arid region south of the Sahara) suffered a devastating drought that continued through much of the 1970S.10 These famines didn’t just hurt poor Africans and Asians; they also caused skyrocketing food prices worldwide.
--Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway