June 12, 2002
U.S. to honor top researcher of
atmosphere
By Bruce Lieberman
The San Diego Union-Tribune
LA JOLLA -- One day in the late
1980s, Charles David Keeling walked into
his boss's office at UCSD's Scripps
Institution of Oceanography and pointed
to an odd blip on a graph showing steadily
rising levels of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere.
"Ed, do you know what that is?"
he asked Edward Frieman, then director
of Scripps.
The blip, Keeling explained,
revealed a slowdown in rising levels of
carbon dioxide around the globe caused
by a spike in oil prices -- and a resulting
fall in consumption -- during the Iran-Iraq
war from 1980 to 1988.
The scientist's measurements of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had
grown so precise, so nuanced over the
years, that he was able to detect subtle
changes in the planet's respiration.
Today, Keeling is considered a
towering figure in atmospheric science
and a pioneer in global warming research.
His 45-year record of rising carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, which mirrors
humanity's escalating appetite for fossil
fuels, is now required reading in science
textbooks.
The illustration of that record is
called the "Keeling Curve."
At the White House today,
President Bush is to award Keeling the
National Medal of Science, the nation's
highest award for lifetime achievement in
scientific research.
Keeling,
a
professor
of
oceanography at Scripps, is one of 15
medal recipients this year.
Through his research, Keeling has
tied small dips in the rising curve of
carbon dioxide to changes in oil
consumption.
"He could see just fantastic
imprints of what was going on in the
world in his data," said Frieman, director
of Scripps from 1986 to 1996. "I think
it's a tribute to his scientific acuity."
Keeling was the first to accurately
record increasing levels of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere, and to discover that
more than half of the carbon burned is
accumulating there. The implication of
ever more carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere is the subject of great debate,
but many
scientists say
higher
concentrations will lead to rising
temperatures worldwide, rising sea levels
and radical changes to our climate.
"In the entire complex debate
about global climate change, Keeling's . . .
curve of the global accumulation of
carbon dioxide has stood the test of time,"
said Charles Kennel, Scripps' director.
"His research results are pertinent
to every human being on the globe."
Keeling, 74, who lives in Del Mar
with his wife, has not always received such
widespread acclaim. For years, the federal
government threatened to cut his funding,
arguing that monitoring global changes in
atmospheric carbon dioxide was routine
work not worthy of university research.
"He had to really struggle to keep
his funding," said Jeff Severinghaus, a
colleague at Scripps who studies the
historical record of the atmosphere
contained in polar ice.
"I think society and humanity as a
whole owes him a great debt."
Carbon dioxide, a byproduct of
burning fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas
and coal, makes up more than 50 percent
of greenhouse gases.
When Keeling began analyzing air
samples collected from around the world
in the late 1950s, 315 out of every million
1
air molecules were carbon dioxide.
Today, that concentration is 370 parts per
million.
Before the industrial revolution in
the mid-19th century, the concentration
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was
between 270 and 280 parts per million.
"There's a very close relationship
between what fossil fuel emissions are and
what the (carbon dioxide) rise is," Keeling
said in a recent interview. "It's really
close."
Only about 40 percent of the
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is being
absorbed by the Earth. Most scientists
believe the oceans absorb at least half of
that, but more studies are needed.
But it's undisputed that the
amount of carbon burned into the
atmosphere keeps growing.
When
Keeling began his measurements, the
equivalent of 2 ½ billion metric tons of
coal was being burned into the
atmosphere every year.
"Now, it's triple that, and it's not
clear it's going to stop," Keeling said.
The consequences of such an
increase are the subject of fierce debate.
But scientists do know that the average
surface temperature of the Earth has
increased 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the
past century -- a dramatic increase,
scientists say, for such a short period of
time and because the warming has
occurred nearly worldwide.
"We're not sure what's going to
happen," Keeling said.
When Keeling began making his
measurements, existing data showed
varying levels of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere, depending on where air
samples were collected.
But Keeling, then a young
graduate student at the California Institute
of Technology in Pasadena, almost
immediately found that carbon dioxide
levels were uniform from one place to
another. After joining Scripps in 1956,
Keeling began collecting samples from
around the world, including Antarctica,
Finland and in the equatorial Pacific,
where the atmosphere would be less likely
corrupted by human activity.
In the flasks of air his assistants
shipped back to Scripps, Keeling
repeatedly found uniform levels of carbon
dioxide, and they were uniformly rising.
Ray Weiss, a beginning graduate
student in the early 1960s and now a
researcher at Scripps, spent the summer in
1964 collecting samples in the eastern
Pacific, off Easter Island and Chile.
"Certainly he was the first to have
anything of sufficient precision to really
figure out what atmospheric (carbon
dioxide) was doing," Weiss said.
Keeling's persistence in the face of
constant threats to his funding and his
commitment to the extreme rigors of
isolating carbon dioxide from air samples
to measure their concentrations required a
certain kind of scientist, his colleagues
said.
Weiss, with more than a bit of
affection, has used the term "persnickety"
to describe the elder scientist, who plays
classical piano and used to sing in a
Renaissance choral group at the University
of California San Diego.
"You could not do what Dave
Keeling has done in his life's work
without being persnickety," Weiss said.
"It's persnicketiness that's absolutely
required to do this job right.
"I mean, he is measuring
extremely small changes in the global
atmosphere, and to do that properly
requires maintenance of very careful
standards ... of always being on the
lookout for things that might go wrong,
or for errors in the data. It takes a certain
kind of person to do that for their whole
life."
Keeling's profile of atmospheric
carbon dioxide has become a model for
2
other long-term research projects costing
billions of dollars, Frieman said.
"I think it's a symbol . . . of how
science has to be carried out in the 21st
century," Frieman said.
Monitoring
climatic
changes
brought about by the ozone hole would
not be possible without studies such as
Keeling's, nor would changes in global
biodiversity
be
possible
without
observations made over long periods of
time, he said.
Keeling, who retreats in the
summer to his family's home in the
Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, said
atmospheric
science
remains
an
unfinished
business,
with
many
unanswered questions.
"Basically, we have to wait" to
learn the consequences of a changing
atmosphere. "But the question is, while
we're waiting, are we going to do
anything?"
-End-
3