The Origins of Climate Science: The Idea of Energy Balance

Abstract

Heat is the kinetic motion of atoms or molecules. The Laws of Thermodynamics were developed in the middle of the nineteenth century. These laws state that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change form; that two nearby systems, each internally in thermodynamic equilibrium, but not in equilibrium with each other, will exchange matter or energy and reach a mutual thermodynamic equilibrium; and, as the temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a minimum. Entropy is energy that is no longer available for doing mechanical work; it is the random motion of atoms or molecules; it is waste heat; it cannot be used to do anything: it is Mother Nature’s tax on everything. The ability of some gases to absorb and reradiate energy and to heat the air was discovered and measured in the middle of the nineteenth century. The idea of the climate being the result of a balance between the energy received and emitted by the Earth arose but lacked a formal analysis. The concept of a ‘black body,’ a perfect absorber and emitter of energy was developed in the latter half of that century. It formed the basis for understanding the energy balance of incoming radiation from the Sun and outgoing radiation from the Earth, and hence the planetary temperature.

Intermezzo IX. Getting used to the East

This time I arrived in Prague by air. Stairs were rolled out to our plane. We were told to remain in our seats for a few minutes, an official was coming on board to take someone off the plane. You can imagine my immediate concern and then utter surprise when Pavel came striding down the aisle with a huge grin on his face. Very officiously he said “Come with me please.” We left the plane before any of the other passengers could disembark. We walked over to the immigration counter, and I was immediately ushered through. I had no idea what was going on, but kept my mouth shut. We picked up my luggage, and got in his car. He was laughing. “Pavel, what was that about? How did you do that?” He showed me his little red Academy of Sciences pass book. He told me it looked just like the ones used by the Secret Police, so he had simply flashed it at the guards and immigration people at the airport. He was just having fun to see what he could get away with.

During my visit to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1964, the Micropaleontology Section of the Czech Academy seemed like a home away from home. I had become determined that I was going to learn Czech. Not so easy as it might sound. First there are 42 letters, some with very special sounds. indicated by the letters with little check-marks over them: Č is ch, Ď is dyu, Ě is ye, Ň is nye, Š is sh, and Ř is erzh (as in Dvořak) and involves tricks with the tongue that only Czechs can manage. It is often said that Czech is the only language where you can actually break your tongue. This is not true, I later learned that Slovak is just as bad. At the Micropaleontology office I would get help with learning such senseless expressions as: Strč prst skrz krk (which, translated means ‘stick your finger through your throat’). Note, no vowels. Or Vlk zmrzl, zhltl hrst zrn (translation -the wolf froze, he swallowed a handful of grains) Again, no vowels. Or the classic Třistatřiatřicettři stříbrných křepelek přeletělo přes třistatřiatřicettři stříbrných střech, Three hundred and thirty three silver quails flew over three hundred and thirty three silver roofs. Pavel was especially concerned that I learn that last one. If you can say that properly, you can speak Czech. I was never successful, but I provided a lot of amusement for those in the office.

One of Pavel’s assistants, Peter, had a problem that he hoped I could help solve. His uncle in Chicago had invited him to visit. Using his uncles’s letter he had made application for a visa from the US consulate, but one necessary document was missing. He needed a statement from someone saying that they would cover his expenses in the US. His uncle would do this, but had not known he needed to include it in his letter of invitation. I typed out a University of Illinois letterhead, and wrote out a letter to the US consulate stating that I would cover his expenses. Pavel told me, “You know he isn’t coming back.” I suspected as much, so now I was involved with assisting the departure of another Czech to the US.

One of the other paleontologists I wanted to meet in Prague was Eva Hanzlikova. I knew her through her publications on coccoliths, and we had exchanged a couple of letters. She worked in the Czech Geological Survey. Off we went one morning. We walked through the old town to the Geological Survey Building. As in all government buildings, there was a ‘porter’ or guard just inside the door to check in with. Pavel said that we wanted to visit Dr. Hanzlikova. The porter opened his visitors book and asked him to sign in. Pavel started to explain to me in English that we needed to sign in. The porter asked if I was a foreigner and where I had come from. Pavel told him I was a Professor from America. Immediately the porter picked up the phone, and after a brief conversation handed the receiver to Pavel. On the other end of the line was the woman in charge of the Secret Political Office in the Survey. She asked him how he could be so disrespectful of the state to bring an American unannounced to this building. He should have made an application for my visit three months in advance. Pavel explained that he did not know until yesterday that I wanted to visit Dr. Hanzlikova. The Political Officer informed Pavel that he had broken the law, and that there would be political consequences for his treasonous behavior. Pavel was told that I would not be allowed to enter the Survey building, and further that he was forbidden from telling me about his conversation with her. He hung up the phone and we stepped outside. Pavel told me what had happened. Then we noticed that there was a coffee house across the street. We went there and ordered coffee. Pavel used the telephone to call Eva and told her where we were. A few minutes later she appeared. We ordered another cup of coffee for her and spent the rest of the morning having had a good time discussing our work. There is a Czech expression for what happened: ‘Vlk se nazral a koza zustala celá’ which translates to ‘the wolf ate his fill but the goat was unhurt.’

One evening a few days later, Pavel came to my hotel to take me to dinner. He said quietly that we needed to talk. He picked up the telephone and pointed at the bottom, later explaining to me that telephones in the rooms for foreigners usually had microphones attached to listen to anything being said in the room. As we walked along the Vácslavské náměsti, Pavel explained that although he was not a member of the Communist Party, friends kept him informed on what was going on. There was a movement toward reform being organized. Lots of young people were joining the party intent on changing it from within. There was a lot going on underneath the surface in Prague.

The summer of 1964 included more than just the stay in Prague. We made a trip to see the Cretaceous rocks in Slovakia, the eastern part of the country. Our first day was a drive to Bratislava, where we met Josef Salaj, a micropaleontologist with the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Josef was our guide as we explored the western end of the Carpathian Mountains. Slovakia was different from Bohemia and Moravia, with less of a western background. The farm houses were different, and in general it looked neglected. The towns still had loudspeakers throughout them, which at noon and a few other times during the day, would play martial music followed by slogans or even a speech from some communist official. You couldn’t get rid of the propaganda simply by turning off your radio.

In the evenings we stayed in simple country inns. Westerners were unknown here, so I was quite a novelty. The food was surprisingly good, after all we were in a major farming area, and the farmers kept the best things for themselves and the locals. Then there was “The Book.” Each inn (or hotel, restaurant or any other establishment for that matter) had a Book. You could ask for the Book and write comments in it. The Book was ordinarily used for making complaints. It would be reviewed periodically by party functionaries and the operators of the establishment would get lectured on their shortcomings or even reprimanded. We almost always asked for the Book, looking very serious. Then Pavel, Josef and I would write long complimentary notes, praising the staff for the excellent food and courteous service, ending with our signatures and titles. While we were doing this, the staff would be cowering on the other side of the room. Then, looking very serious, they would come and take the closed Book away. A few minutes later we would hear happy voices as they read what we had written. Glasses of Slivovitz and perhaps another bottle of wine would appear, and our stay would be a most pleasant one.

Each evening we would have ‘map count.’ We had detailed topographic maps to help us locate the rock exposures. And each evening Pavel and Josef would check off the maps against a list to be sure we had all of them. I finally asked what this little ceremony was about. They explained that the maps were secret, and no foreigner was ever supposed to see them. These were accurate maps, not like those you could buy in the stores. Maps available to foreigners had ‘errors’ on them, such as having the road or a town shown on the wrong side of a river. They were meant to confuse invading troops. I pointed out to Pavel and Josef that I was a foreigner and I was looking at the maps. The answer was purely from the Good Soldier Schweik: “When we checked out the maps they didn’t ask us if there were any foreigners going with us on our field trip.”

When we got back to Prague, I found we were not going to be able to finish off all the work before I was scheduled to leave. I needed to get a visa extension. This involved going to an office that handled visas for foreigners. Pavel accompanied me. We explained what we wanted. A clerk in a military-like uniform took my passport. About half an hour later she returned and handed me my passport back. There was no visa extension inside, instead “The Commissarin wishes to speak to you.” I left Pavel behind as I was led down a long whitewashed corridor and shown a bench where I could sit. All I could think was “uh oh, this doesn’t seem good.” I wondered which of the Czech laws I had broken in the past few months they had found out about. I waited about a half an hour, and then the door opened and another woman in military dress appeared, “The Commissarin will see you now.”

I was led into the Commissarin’s room, and the door closed behind me. The Commissarin was a large, middle-aged very stern looking lady. She looked at me for a few minutes without saying anything. You can imagine how I felt; I was sure I was going to be led off to a prison cell. Then she said “You want a five day extension on your visa?” “Yes.” “You are an American here on a visa, you are free to leave the country whenever you want. Why on earth would you want to stay in this damned country one day longer than necessary?” I was so surprised I didn’t really know what to say, but I sputtered out that I was working with colleagues at the Czech Academy of Sciences and we needed a few more days to finish the work. She sort of shook her head as though I were nuts, put the visa extension stamp in my passport and handed it back to me. “There, enjoy your work, and have a good trip back home.”

There definitely seemed to be some cracks appearing in the Communist monolith.

I had seen a lot of Czechoslovakia, and we discussed whether, if I were able to get it, Pavel might be able to accept a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois for a year. If he could come over, we could look at the Cretaceous of the US together in detail. But that would mean he would be away from his section of the Czech Academy for a whole year. He checked it out and found that it could be done. Shortly after I got back to Urbana, I started making inquiries about how to go about applying for the postdoctoral fellowship. It was not a straightforward procedure if the candidate was to be from a Communist country.

That fall I had a phone call from Peter who had just arrived in Chicago. That was the last I heard from him until a few years later when I met him at a Convention of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and learned he was now employed in the US petroleum industry.

My trip to Prague in the summer of 1965 was relatively short. I had good news for Pavel: the University had approved a Postdoctoral Fellowship for him for the 1966–1967 Academic year. Pavel had bad news for me. He had joined the Communist Party to be one of those working from the inside for change. He thought this would probably prevent him from getting a visa to the US. I expected that this would certainly complicate matters, but all we could do was wait and see what happened.

In the meantime, Pavel had received an invitation to work at the West German Geological Survey (Bundesanstalt für Bodenforschung) in Hannover. He spent eight months there in 1966, returning to Prague at Christmas time. His Postdoctoral appointment at the University of Illinois was to start on January 1, 1967. However, when he went to apply for his visa for the US, there was a problem. Pavel got caught up in the Kazan-Komarek affair.

Vladimir Komarek was born in Czechoslovakia, sent to Germany during the war as a slave laborer, escaped back to Prague in 1944, and served as a translator for the Allied forces in Czechoslovakia in 1945. He escaped to the West after the 1948 communist coup. He was then recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, the French intelligence agency, as an agent. He built up a network of spies in Czechoslovakia, crossing the Iron Curtain four times in the next three years. He left intelligence work in 1951 and took on a new identity, using the surname Kazan.

As Vladimir Kazan he worked as a travel agent in France, where he met an American woman and married her. Inn April, 1955, he moved to the United States, starting a travel agency in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He changed his name again, to Kazan-Komarek, and became a U.S. citizen in November 1960. Everything about his earlier activities seemed forgotten. He even got involved in arranging travel to the USSR using the Soviet Travel Agency, Intourist.

In the meantime, Czechoslovak and Soviet authorities had become aware of his activites as a agent for the French and decided to set a trap for him. Vladimir Kazan-Komarek, thinking that everything had been forgotten, innocently accepted an invitation from the Soviet Travel Agency Intourist to attend a travel conference in Moscow in the fall of 1966. On October 31, as he was flying out of the USSR on Aeroflot, the plane made an unscheduled stop in Prague, citing engine trouble. Vladimir Kazan-Komarek was arrested as a spy and charged with high treason and murder.

When Pavel applied for his visa, the US Consulate informed him that it was not issuing any visas, except for family visits and duties at the United Nations, until Kazan-Komarek was free. Kazan-Komarek was tried by the Czechoslovak authorities in January and sentenced to 8 years in prison. On February 3, 1967 he was granted amnesty and given 48 hours to leave the country. Shortly thereafter Pavel got his visa and arrived to start his postdoctoral year in March, 1967. There was still one problem. The papers he was to sign to receive his stipend from the University had a loyalty statement that ‘I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party.’ Pavel was not about to commit perjury. The University official responsible for these matters told me ‘Send him over to my office, I’ll give him the papers to sign. He won’t sign that line; I won’t be looking. I’ll take the papers, put them in the file. Done.’ Nothing was ever simple in those days, but somehow everything worked.

We had a year to work together on sorting out the distribution of Cretaceous coccoliths. We made several field trips to collect samples of rock. I would make out a detailed itinerary of the trip, including information on who we would meet with, and send it to the State Department for approval. In about a month I would get back a letter of official permission for Pavel’s travel. The longest trip was to Miami, then through the Gulf Coast states, to Los Angeles, then to San Francisco, and back through Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri to Illinois. We visited a number of micropaleontologists along the way, and they helped us with field collecting. I later found out that we were followed by a team of FBI agents who interrogated almost everyone we had met with. Micropaleontologists love to talk shop, and those agents must have learned a lot about the stratigraphic distribution of Lithraphidites quadratus , the paleobiogeography of Watzaueria barnesae , and other such fascinating topics.

Travel restrictions from the Czech side relaxed somewhat, and Pavel’s wife Jiřina was able to come to Illinois for a few months.

Pavel returned to Prague in March,1968, taking the Italian ocean liner Leonardo da Vinci back to Europe. Czechoslovakia was now in the midst of Alexander Dubček’s internal communist revolution. When Pavel arrived back he was assigned a special duty in the Geological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The first free secret ballot of the members of the Institute selected five members to form a ‘Rehabilitation Commission.’ Pavel received the largest number of votes, and was thereby named its Chair. The purpose of the Commission was to examine the files of the Secret Police to determine whose careers had been damaged on a political basis. His colleagues thought that his experience outside the country made him especially well qualified for this task. It was a big job, and he was still working on it when I visited in the summer of 1968.