Wallace Broecker's February Washington Post obituary noted his seminal role role in adding 'global warming' to the American vocabulary with this 1975 Science article :
Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?
Abstract
If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climatic change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide. By analogy with similar events in the past, the natural climatic cooling which, since 1940, has more than compensated for the carbon dioxide effect, will soon bottom out. Once this happens, the exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years.
The obit also notes :
Long interested in climate change, Dr. Broecker had previously worked under climate researcher Roger Revelle, helping to prepare a 1965 report for President Lyndon B. Johnson that linked fossil fuel emissions to rising sea levels, the melting of the southern ice cap and freshwater acidification.
There was far more to Broecker's sction of the report than that, notes Post obit writer Harrison Smith-- his work transformed modern understanding of the ocean's role on climate change:
“Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University, once told the alumni magazine Columbia College Today. “He is intellectually so huge in how the earth system works and what its history is that all of us are following Wally in some way or another.”
yet somehow, the full 300 pages of the 1965 White House report took decades to surface on the web, and in it one finds work of startling- and disconcerting originality:
Those who have striven to make carbon mitigation the only polite topic of climate policy conversation are none too happy to find that two of their icons, Al Gore's mentor Roger Revelle and Wallace Broeker, the most formidible climatic oceanographer of his generation, put the modulation the albedo of the hydrosphere at the head of their list of ways to manage the impact of radiative forcing from CO2. Those who today reflexively anathematize solar radiation management as a response To radiative forcing would do well to read and remember what they said- most of all the man who publicized the report: Lyndon Johnson's Presidential Press Secretary, Bill Moyers.
Abstract
If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climatic change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide. By analogy with similar events in the past, the natural climatic cooling which, since 1940, has more than compensated for the carbon dioxide effect, will soon bottom out. Once this happens, the exponential rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide content will tend to become a significant factor and by early in the next century will have driven the mean planetary temperature beyond the limits experienced during the last 1000 years.
