One Scientist and Decades of Numbers

Charles David Keeling worked his way up the academic ladder until, in 1968, he was appointed a professor of oceanography at the University of California’s prestigious Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. He died in 2005, but the echoes of his research have rocked the world. During his post-doctoral studies at Cal Tech, he had developed a system to measure accurately the amount of CO₂ in the air. Keeling was obsessed with changes in our atmosphere, and in 1958, he began systematically began measuring the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the earth’s atmosphere. He deployed that system on aircraft, onboard ships and most significantly in a small facility in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, a site that has pumped out data on the air we breathe ever since.

Here’s what the Scripps website says about this fascinating man: “Keeling was a world leader in research on the carbon cycle and the increase of …CO₂ in the atmosphere, known as the greenhouse effect, which may lead to changes in the global climate. He was the first to confirm the accumulation of atmospheric CO₂ by very precise measurements that produced a data set now known widely as the Keeling Curve. Prior to these investigations, it was commonly held that the oceans would readily absorb any excess CO₂ from the atmosphere produced by the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial activities.”

With so many people in serious denial about the greenhouse effect resulting from the accumulation of CO₂ in the upper atmosphere, Dr. Keeling became quite a controversial figure. Because his data has been accurately kept for over half a century, this research has been one of the cornerstones of climate change academics and government officials the world round. His initial reports of accelerating amounts of CO₂ in the atmosphere were greeted with skepticism, but let’s just say his work has since been widely accepted by all but a very small minority of climate experts. The Mauna Loa Observatory was well-situated to take measurements of the ocean air currents that crossed this island chain.

The December 21st New York Times summarizes what his data revealed: “When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide… By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.”

We know the likely results of this trend: melting ice sheets and glaciers, rising oceans inundating coastal communities, agricultural areas losing their capacity to produce climate-sensitive crops resulting in disruptions in food production, insects and disease migrating as climate patterns warm once cooler regions, the extinction of animal and plant life unable to adjust to the changes or migrate to new habitats, etc. And still there are skeptics, despite solutions having been pressed in both Republican and Democratic administrations: “Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science. Some of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny… One of them is Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. In a recent Congressional hearing on global warming, he said, ‘The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.’” NY Times.

We didn’t sign the Kyoto Protocol, we diluted the recent Cancun accord, and while neither Rohrabacher nor I will around when it really gets nasty, I would have hoped with would have had greater concern for our children and our grandchildren. Commercial interests and the press to “develop” in former third world countries will extract a toll that too many will be required to pay. “[B]y the time [Keeling] died, global warming had not become a major political issue. That changed in 2006, when Mr. Gore’s movie and book, both titled ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ brought the issue to wider public attention. The Keeling Curve was featured in both... In 2007, a body appointed by the United Nations declared that the scientific evidence that the earth was warming had become unequivocal, and it added that humans were almost certainly the main cause. Mr. Gore and the panel jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize.” NY Times. When exactly will survivability press this issue to the point of meaningful global action? When it is just too late?

I’m Peter Dekom, and while economic and political chaos make environmental issues difficult to rise above the clutter, this is issue actually is a matter of life… or death.