In an article coauthored with Hans Seuss in 1957, Revelle proposed the idea of the greenhouse effect, indicating that this phenomenon would lead eventually to global warming. Later in his career, Revelle served on the faculty of Harvard University, where he taught Al Gore, among others.

Roger Revelle was born in Seattle, Washington, on March 7, 1909. He received a bachelor's degree in geology in 1929 from Pomona College and then attended the University of California at Berkeley, receiving a Ph.D. in oceanography in 1936 (Dorfman, 1997). After completing his studies, Revelle went to work at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, leaving briefly to serve as an oceanographer for the U.S. Navy during World War II. During this time, he was quite influential in the Navy's oceanographic research program. He returned to Scripps, remaining there until 1964 and serving as director of the institution from 1950 until 1964. Thus, Revelle was a major contributor to the field of oceanography in both the public and the private sector. He also served as a science adviser to the John F. Kennedy administration.

Upon leaving Scripps, Revelle went to Harvard University, where he founded the Center for Population Studies and served as a professor for Al Gore, sparking his interest in climate change and global warming. Gore later cited Revelle as his mentor in his crusade against global warming, for which Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. While at Harvard University, Revelle focused his interest and his research on the problems of world hunger. Revelle was hopeful that by increasing knowledge of biology and of the environment, science could improve agricultural production. In 1976, he returned to California as a professor of science, technology, and public affairs at the University of California in San Diego. In 1974, he served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Gore, 2006). Shortly before his death in 1991, he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his work on the greenhouse effect.

Revelle and Hans Seuss wrote the seminal paper in the field of global warming. In this paper, Revelle and Seuss suggested that the burning of fossil fuels was dramatically increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. They then went on to indicate that this CO2 was very slowly absorbed by the surface of the ocean. They attributed the slowness of this process to the buffer effect, which has become known as the Revelle effect. Revelle and Seuss also believed that the CO2 unleashed by the burning of fossil fuels would result in a greenhouse effect, with the CO2 absorbing infrared radiation and trapping heat over the Earth's surface. This process in the long run would lead to global warming.

Revelle hoped that the International Geophysical Year (July, 1957-December, 1958), which he helped create, would provide an opportunity to investigate the impact of increasing CO2 levels on the temperature of the planet. In 1984, Revelle became the first chair of the Committee on Climate Change and the Ocean under the auspices of the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research. Since that time, this organization has been concerned with the ocean's role in global warming. Work that Revelle pioneered in the mid-twentieth century served as the precursor to the concern over global warming and climate change as it existed in the early twentyfirst century.

References

1. Dorfman, R., and P. P. Rogers, eds. Science with a Human Face: In Honor of Roger Randall Revelle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard School of Public Health Press, 1997.

2. Gore, Al. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. New York: Rodale Press, 2006.

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