 Boulder attracted such institutions as HAO, UCAR, NCAR, the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory (CRPL) of the National Bureau of Standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), JILA, LASP, IBM, Ball Aerospace, and NOAA during the 1940s – 1970s.“Walt was enormously helpful in bringing a lot of very ambitious and competing scientific groups together.”

In 1979, Roberts and Henry Lansford published "The Climate Mandate", which discussed climatic variation and its implications.Greenhouse Glasnost, which was discussed at a 1989 Sundance Symposium on Global Climate Change, was one outcome of this international exchange.