Carbon Dioxide Review: 1982.

The buildup of CO/sub 2/ is a reality, monitored with increasing precision since 1957 and inferred for much earlier dates. A statistical section gives the monitored values to 1980, as well as a review of a long series of measurements made at Mauna Loa by the pioneers of such monitoring, Charles D. Keeling, Robert B. Bacastow, and Timothy P. Whorf. The book discusses internal transport processes in the ocean, of ocean-atmosphere interaction, of the magnitude of forest and soil carbon wastage, of the future course of fossil-fuel consumption. Yet something else emerges, too: if the CO/sub 2/ buildup continues; if the big general circulation models are right about its impact on climate, and if we have not miscalculated the potential role of the oceans, then we face a climatic change in the next century and a half like nothing the post-glacial world, and hence civilized humanity, has seen.