Downwinders

[bhunter]

Originally Posted by mpholland

I still live downwind and downriver from Hanford. Just one more thing I can blame some of my issues on.

I remember in a nuclear chemistry course I had at UCSD, the Professor walking in with a scanner and easily finding all the students that had recently worked with radioactive isotopes in their biology courses. Interesting stuff.

Sadly, I just learned that that Professor, James Arnold, died January 2012. He was one of the people behind carbon dating in Libby's lab and also worked on The Manhatten Project. In the spirit of this new environmental sub-forum, here are a couple of links wrt the early foundations of the notion of global warming and atmospheric carbon.

An interview with James Arnold:
http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/31207.html

Roger Revelle's Global Warming idea from AIP:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Revelle.htm

I was fortunate to have courses from both Roger Revelle and James Arnold.

Here's a quote from Arnold's interview regarding the Fermi Institute:

Arnold:
Oh, yes. The Institute for Nuclear Studies, the Fermi Institute now, was an extraordinarily lively place. It was one of three institutes. Fermi was the famous leader, but, so they say, exaggerate slightly, Nobel laureates or future Nobel laureates were kind of a dime a dozen around that place. And Leo Szilard, who we were talking of, was in another institute devoted to biology. So there were stellar people around, and people communicated with each other. There was a lot going on, and it was exciting, and people talked…

A couple of observations:

"Communicating with each other" may have been more common then than now despite today's ubiquity of communications channels.

I found that reading the Arnold interview and having at least a passing knowledge of the players and their academic work helps in understanding the concepts underlying global warming. The reinterpretation by the pop-scientists and the media have done much to harm both science and solutions to global warming.