Did You Know A Republican Hero Discovered Global Warming?
A 27 year-old researcher looked at his watch and sat up in his sleeping bag next to his wife, Louise, who was nursing their newborn son, Drew. It was 1955 in Yosemite and the Forest Service had authorized Charles (Dave) Keeling, PhD., to camp out below Tioga Pass for a few weeks in order to take carbon dioxide measurements before the campground was open. This way the air samples might avoid campfire smoke and other carbon sources that might skew his data. The majority of his doctoral program classmates from Northwestern had taken lucrative jobs in the chemical industry but Keeling wanted to understand how things worked, and in particular, he wanted to find the average concentration of carbon dioxide in water and in the air.
After measuring air samples from Big Sur, the Olympic peninsula, Arizona, the roof of his lab in Mudd Hall at Caltech, and a few other locations with his lab-made equipment Keeling was on a quest to take measurements in the unpolluted natural environment in as many places as he could. Those first few measurements of background CO2 averaged around 310 parts per million (ppm).
At Yosemite, Keeling and his wife had washed their clothes and hung them on tree branches to dry in the sun. Starving mule deer, hungry after a long cold winter, had wandered into the campsite one night and made off with some of their hanging clothes. The next night Keeling watched a large deer chomp onto his lab notebook and wander off with it clenched in his mouth. Keeling hurried after him on foot through snowdrifts, flashlight in hand, and eventually managed to spook the deer enough to drop the notebook. Fortunately he was able to retrieve the notebook which was missing it’s cover, but with all of his data, none the worse for wear but engraved with a few large teeth prints.
After checking his watch, Keeling arose at four am right on schedule to get an air sample. Once outside he held his breath, opened the stopcock on the glass vacuum bottle and let it fill with air, as he had done methodically every four hours for several weeks at Yosemite. He then labeled the bottle and put it back in a crate with the others to go back to the lab to be analyzed. His single professional focus was to objectively and accurately measure the carbon dioxide in the air in remote locations in his search for some sort of average concentration in the atmosphere. Ultimately he wanted to find the average concentration of CO2 in the air worldwide.
Once back at his lab, Keeling found that the carbon dioxide levels in the air actually rose and fell during every 24-hour period. When he plotted the levels on an axis over time, each 24 hour period revealed a horizontal S. He surmised that during photosynthesis, plants removed carbon dioxide and produced oxygen during the day and during the nighttime plants produced carbon dioxide and hence, higher levels showed up in the atmosphere. This accounted for the daily S curve.
Later, working at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, with his enthusiastic mentor Roger Revelle, Keeling’s quest for accuracy led to him expanding research on carbon dioxide. Not only did he confirm the 24-hour cycle but his data showed a seasonal carbon dioxide cycle related to changes in plant respiration. The Earth appeared to “breathe”, inhaling and exhaling carbon dioxide over time.
In 1958 Keeling built and set up instruments to take carbon dioxide measurements on Mauna Loa in Hawaii, an extinct volcanic mountain. This allowed him to study air samples that might be as pure as anywhere on Earth, after blowing thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean.The 1958 Mauna Loa readings of 315 ppm coincided with the readings other scientists we getting using the same methods at other remote locations around the world, but more concerning was the fact that Keeling and others found that each year the average carbon dioxide concentration had been rising by one approximately part per million.
The graph of the cyclic, increasing carbon dioxide levels he found at Mauna Loa became known as “Keeling’s Curve”. That curve, including the “hockey stick” J-shape that shows accelerating atmospheric carbon dioxide at the end of the last century is well known and respected since it correlates with anthropogenic CO2 production and the rising of Earth’s average temperature.
By the late 1960s scientists began warning that carbon dioxide levels were indeed rising in response to human activity. Keelings mentor, Dr. Roger Revelle, had moved to Harvard and was reporting Keeling’s research in his classes. One of Revelle’s students by the name of Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., saw Keeling’s Curve and wondered what it might mean for the future of the planet. Mr. Gore later published a book and video named, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, which pointedly laid blame for global warming on fossil fuels and further politicized the issue of climate change.
By 1998, Keeling was pushing back against climate change deniers. He responded to charges that climate change was a myth by saying that the real myth was believing that Earth’s ability to absorb pollution was limitless.
After his death in 2005, when atmospheric CO2 levels had reached 380 ppm, his widow, Louise, commented that Dave Keeling, who was a registered Republican, would have been dismayed to see the hard political battle being fought over climate change. He didn’t see it as a political issue in the least. Unfortunately rather than celebrating Keeling’s discovery and our commitment to curb carbon, we are mired in a deep political conflict. The Mauna Loa readings continue today and show CO2 levels of over 400 ppm as extreme weather and fires give us a preview of the climate disaster scenarios of the future.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Weiner, Jonathan, The Next 100 Years: Shaping The Fate Of Our Living Earth, Bantam Books, NY, 1990.
