Charles david keeling biography channel

It looks, at first glance, like a doodle, a zig-zag pattern squiggled absent-mindedly on a notepad during an uninspiring meeting. In fact, it has been called one of the most important scientific works of the 20th century and its emergence in the 1950s offered one of the first key readings of the health of planet Earth.

The seemingly innocuous squiggle of the Keeling Curve is actually a meticulous record of the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the result of daily readings that have continued almost uninterrupted for more than 60 years. Its importance lies in the fact that, over those six decades, the zig-zag has trended steadily upward.

Science historian Spencer Weart describes the Keeling Curve as “the central icon of the greenhouse effect.” It was, he writes in his book, The Discovery of Global Warming, “not quite the discovery of global warming. It was the discovery of the possibility of global warming.”

Its origins can be traced to a campsite in Big Sur, California. In 1953, Charles David Keeling was a young postgraduate geochemist embarking on a study to compare the relative abundances of carbon dioxide in water and air. To do that, he first had to measure the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, which, to that point, nobody had done to any great precision. And because nobody had done it, there was no off-the-shelf equipment readily available to do so. So, Keeling made his own instrument, working from instructions for a prototype he found in a 1916 journal article, and he undertook the day’s drive to Big Sur. Unsure whether the CO2 even in pristine air next to the Pacific Ocean would be constant, he decided to take air samples every few hours over a full day and night, a meticulousness that would characterize his career.

“He lived by a kind of moral code that looked at there being a right way and

Charles David Keeling was the scientist who famously measured carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and discovered two important facts: Allowing for variations due to changing seasons and day vs. night, CO₂ concentrations are very similar virtually everywhere in nature and they’re steadily rising. The upward-trending plot of measurements he took atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano became known as the “Keeling curve” and serves as a keystone in our understanding of global warming and climate change.

The play, written by George Shea, directed by Kirsten Sanderson and starring Mike Farrell (B.J. Hunnicutt on the TV series "M*A*S*H"), launched the third season of an annual festival of new science-driven plays at Caltech. But it might never have come into being if the playwright had gone with his initial impulse.

“The big challenge in a thing like this,” Farrell said, “is to try to figure out a way to make it an entertainment, a play, and not just a lecture.” The approach they chose was to have the Keeling character explain his work within a narrative of his life.

The play’s Keeling amiably guides us through his childhood, when an encounter with his fourth-grade teacher led to his lack of respect for “ignorant people in positions of authority.” We hear

In 1955 in the wilds of Big Sur, a young Caltech researcher named Charles David Keeling gathered carbon dioxide samples among Northern California’s towering redwoods. Crawling out of his sleeping bag several times a night on research trips conducted over the course of 18 months, from January 1955 to June 1956, Keeling measured background levels of carbon dioxide across the western United States — at Big Sur, but also at desert and high mountain stations, in forests and grassland, above the city of Los Angeles, and over the waters of the Pacific Ocean. 
 

Keeling’s findings would lead him to conduct a separate series of experiments from the top of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa resulting in the famous Keeling Curve — a visual depiction of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) caused by the burning of fossil fuels. His work underpins our understanding of manmade climate change. 
 

Unknown until now, however, is the fact that Keeling’s earliest research into carbon dioxide across the western U.S. was funded in part by the fossil fuel industry via a private foundation — and that in 1954 this foundation was informed of the potential impact of manmade carbon dioxide emissions on both the climate and human civilization. 

Newly discovered documents affirm that the automobile and petroleum industries funded early climate science Keeling conducted at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) between 1954 and 1956. Records show that “oil and auto companies” sponsored the scientist’s research via an organization called the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation, formed in 1953 to tackle Los Angeles’s infamous smog. American Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors were among 18 automotive companies that gave money to the foundation. 

A 1959 internal U.S. Public Health Service memo also identifies the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Western

Graph of atmospheric CO2 from 1958 to the present

"Keeling" redirects here. For other uses, see Keeling (disambiguation).

The Keeling Curve is a graph of the annual variation and overall accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii from 1958 to the present day. The curve is named for the scientist Charles David Keeling, who started the monitoring program and supervised it until his death in 2005.

Keeling's measurements showed the first significant evidence of rapidly increasing carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in the atmosphere. According to Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History of Science at Harvard University, the Keeling curve is one of the most important scientific works of the 20th century. Many scientists credit the Keeling curve with first bringing the world's attention to the current increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Background

Prior to the 1950s, measurements of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations had been taken on an ad hoc basis at a variety of locations. In 1938, engineer and amateur meteorologist Guy Stewart Callendar compared datasets of atmospheric CO₂ from Kew in 1898–1901, which averaged 274 parts per million by volume (ppmv), and from the eastern United States in 1936–1938, which averaged 310 ppmv, and concluded that CO₂ concentrations were rising due to anthropogenic emissions. However, Callendar's findings were not widely accepted by the scientific community due to the patchy nature of the measurements.

Charles David Keeling, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, was the first person to make frequent regular measurements of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations in Antarctica, and on Mauna Loa, Hawaii from March 1958 onwards. Keeling had previously tested and employed measurement techniques at l