The long vision of a Tasmanian science teacher | Climate Tasmania

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The long vision of a Tasmanian science teacher

Years ago, the idea that human activity can influence our climate was considered a bad joke. In such times, those who made an effort to understand and communicate the scientific evidence deserve our profound thanks. One of these pioneering souls is Murray Yaxley, now retired from an outstanding science teaching career.

[Peter Boyer: posted 27 October 2009]

About three years ago I embarked on a little personal project, studying the history of the science that underpins our knowledge of climate change today. For me, a life-long student of history, it’s been a real voyage of discovery.

I’ve been guided in this journey by a splendidly informative, well-told account by physicist and historian Spencer J. Weart . Along the way I’ve had lots of small surprises, discovering in old scientific publications little insights that threw light on this or that aspect of greenhouse warming.

A month ago I got a big surprise. Nel Smit, a member of the Tasmanian Climate Action Council, gave me a photocopy of a battered newspaper cutting, more than half a century old. It came from, of all publications, Hobart’s Mercury newspaper, dated Tuesday, August 25, 1959.

“Ice Caps Could Melt And Drown Cities” was the shocking heading on an article by The Mercury ’s school science writer, “Rhombus”. What followed was no brief, sensationalist piece, but a detailed account of a discovery first described in a scientific paper only two years earlier.

In 1957, oceanographer Roger Revelle and physicist Hans Suess, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, published a paper in the Swedish geophysics journal, Tellus , called “Carbon dioxide exchange between atmosphere and ocean and the question of an increase of atmospheric CO2 during the past decades.”

Revelle had been working for some years on what ...

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http://climatetasmania.com.au/2009/10/27/a112/

http://climatetasmania.com.au/2009/10/27/a112/