Roger Revelle was an American oceanographer best known for his pioneering work on the carbon dioxide balance in the oceans and its effect on climate change. In a seminal paper in 1957, Revelle and Hans Suess argued that the world's citizenry was performing "a great geophysical experiment" and called on the scientific community to monitor changes in the carbon dioxide content of waters and the atmosphere, as well as the rates of production of plants and animals. Revelle and Seuss suggested that the Earth's oceans would absorb excess carbon dioxide generated by humanity by the burning of fossil fuels at a much slower rate than previously predicted by geoscientists, thereby suggesting that human gas emissions might create a "greenhouse effect" that would 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 one of the components of carbonic acid: carbonate ion, bicarbonate ion, or protonated carbonic acid, 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. 

As Director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (1950-64), he assembled a faculty including Hans Suess and David Keeling that would produce some of the most important research related to climate change and the global carbon cycle. Revelle also is noted for fostering oceanographic exploration, presaging plate tectonics, contributing to the understanding of biological effects of radiation in the marine environment, and for studies of human population growth and global food supplies. The breadth of his research and national/international service made him a statesman of science. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1958 and received the Academy's Agassiz Medal "for outstanding achievements in oceanography" in 1963.

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). He remarked to a reporter: "I got it for being the grandfather of the greenhouse effect."

UC San Diego’s first college is named Revelle College in his honor.

Al Gore mentions Revelle as a personal inspiration in a segment of the Academy Award-winning global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Sources

• Alejandra Roman (Lead Author); Cutler J. Cleveland (Contributing Author); Peter Saundry and Sidney Draggan (Topic Editors). 2008. "Revelle, Roger Randall Dougan." In: Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Cutler J. Cleveland (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment). [First published in the Encyclopedia of Earth September 20, 2006; Last revised August 22, 2008; Retrieved May 21, 2009]. 
• Wikipedia Contributors, Roger Revelle, Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, Accessed 21 May 2009.