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Roger 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 one of the first scientists to study global warming and the movement of earth's tectonic plates. The six-foot-four Revelle was often referred to as a "scientific giant," both literally and figuratively. UC San Diego's first college was named Roger Revelle College in his honor.
Biography Roger Randall Dougan Revelle was born in Seattle to William Roger Revelle and Ella Dougan, and grew up in southern California, graduating from Pomona College in 1929 with early studies in Geology and then earning a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of California, Berkeley. Much of his early work in oceanography took place at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in San Diego. He was also Oceanographer of the Navy during WWII. He became 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. Revelle was instrumental in creating the International Geophysical Year in 1958 and he 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). He served as Science Advisor to Interior Secretary Udall during the Kennedy Administration in the early 1960s. In 1957, Revelle co-authored a paper with Hans Seuss that suggested that the Earth's oceans would absorb excess carbon dioxide generated by humanity at a much slower rate than previously predicted by geoscientsists, thereby suggesting that human gas emissions might create a "greenhouse effect" that would cause global warming over time. Although other articles in the same journal discussed carbon dioxide levels, the Suess-Revelle paper was "the only one of the three to stress the growing quantity of CO2 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 carbonate ion, bicarbonate ion, carbonic acid and sodium bicarbonate, among other ionic compounds, 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, geochemisty, 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. During the early 1960s, Revelle fought for the establishment of a University of California campus in San Diego. He contended with the UC University 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 dealt with local San Diego politicians and businessmen who tried to undermine establishing the new campus near the original Scripps Institute in La Jolla by suggesting it be placed in less optimal sites in San Diego proper, such as near San Diego State University or in Balboa Park. 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." When at Scripps and while building UCSD, Revelle also had to deal with a La Jolla community that refused to rent or sell property to Jews. In addition to battling the anti-semitic restrictive covenant of La Jolla real estate, Revelle helped found a new housing subdivision for Scripps professors, partially because some of them would not have been allowed to live in La Jolla. Revelle left Scripps in 1963 and founded the Center for Population Studies at Harvard University. In 1976 he returned to UC San Diego as Professor of Science, Technology and Public Affairs (STPA) in the school's political science department. During his last decade at UCSD and SIO, Revelle continued to work and teach. In the early 1980s, he taught undergraduate STPA seminars twice a year, in Energy and Development (mainly on problems in Africa), the Carbon Dioxide Problem (known now as the Global Warming problem), and Marine Policy. A 1990 heart attack forced him to move his course to the Scripps Institution from the Revelle College provost's office, where he continued to teach the Marine Policy program until his death the following year. In 1991, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President George H.W. Bush (one of about 500 recipients in the 20th Century). Revelle died in San Diego on July 15, 1991 of complications of cardiac arrest. He was survived by his wife, Ellen Scripps Revelle, three daughters, and one son, as well as numerous grandchildren. In his honor, a new research vessel at the Scripps Institution was christened R/V Roger Revelle. Notes | ||||||||
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