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June 3, 2009 from Kusi Website
Revelle was a powerful man, a
noteworthy scientist and a significant force in San Diego in the
1950s. There is no doubt he is largely responsible for the respect
given Scripps Institute of Oceanography and for locating the
University of California at San Diego, UCSD, in La Jolla.
This triggered an avalanche of research that eventually became the
impetus behind the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change and the entire global warming movement.
There is where Professor Revelle encounter student Albert Gore. He involved Gore and his class mates in tabulating the data from a carbon dioxide study. Gore was so impressed he wrote about it in his 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance". That became the story for the movie "An Inconvenient Truth".
The Oscar and Nobel Peace Prize and some
people say 100 million dollars came from that effort. There is no
doubt Roger Revelle had a major impact on Vice President
Gore's life.
In 1988 Roger Revelle was having
major second thoughts about whether carbon dioxide was a significant
greenhouse gas. He wrote letters to two Congressmen about it.
And in 1991 he co-authored a report for the new science magazine
Cosmos in which he expressed his strong doubts about global warming
and urged more research before any remedial action was taken.
A man named Donn Michael Schmidtman
who lives in the San Francisco area was there that day and remembers
the Revelle speech very well. He has told about it in some detail.
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