About a quarter-century ago, fueled by a great deal of blather from the White House, this nation became aware of an economic concept known as the Laffer curve. This impressive-sounding concept became famous, though its usefulness turned out to be political, not practical. David Stockman, the White House budget director at the time, explained it this way:
"[T]he whole California gang had taken [the Laffer curve] literally (and primitively). The way they talked, they seemed to expect that once the supply-side tax cut was in effect, additional revenue would start to fall, manna-like, from the heavens. Since January, I had been explaining that there is no literal Laffer curve."
A proven scientific curve of much greater import that got no attention at the time, even though it had been verified decades earlier, is the Keeling curve. It’s still not well known.
The scientist who discovered the phenomenon that this curve depicts, Charles Keeling, of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, died last week in relative–and undeserved–obscurity. Undeserved because his work brings to our attention perhaps the single greatest challenge our species faces today. Undeserved, too, because unlike the Laffer curve, the Keeling curve has been fully verified by countless meticulous measurements around the globe since it was first published nearly fifty years ago. It’s not controversial, and for it Keeling was given a National Medal of Science in 2002 by President Bush.
The Keeling curve plots the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Take a look (above) and you’ll see a curious squiggling up down, year in and year out. What could explain this three-percent seasonal variation in the amount of CO2 in our air?
In an address to the American Philosophical Society in l969, Keeling suggested that "perhaps it was the result of plants on land growing more rapidly…as a result of "fertilization" caused by higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2, an unusual idea at the time."
This turned out to be the case. It’s an astonishing thing. No one, not even Keeling, expected that the growth of the plants around us could have such a dramatic seasonal effect on the composition of our air…but it does.
Read Keeling’s "environmental autobiography" and a couple of other facts stand out.
First, it’s charming to discover that what led Keeling to his monumental discovery–and proof of the steadily rising percentage of heat-trapping gasses in our atmosphere–was the desire to camp out along the California coast. He had no grand agenda. As he remarks wryly of his younger self: "At the age of 27, the prospect of spending more time at Big Sur State Park to take suites of air and water samples…didn’t seem objectionable, even if I had to get out of a sleeping bag several times in the night.:"
Second, although the percentage of CO2 in the air was not a political issue in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, or even most of the 80’s, Keeling and his handful of backers still had to fight tooth and claw to keep the measuring program (centered in the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii) funded. They suffered numerous cut-backs and near-cancellations. "I learned a lesson that environmental time-series programs have no particular priority in the funding world, even if their main value lies in maintaing long-term continuity of measurements," Keeling wrote.
Third, back in l969, Keeling’s scientific mentor, Roger Revelle of the President’s Science Adisory Council, found a simple way to encapsulate the enormity of our experiment in atmospheric chemistry. As Keeling puts it: "Revelle…was struck by the fact that the human race was returning to the air a significant part of the carbon that had been slowly extracted by plants and buried in sediments during a half billions years of Earth history. He thought that measurable, perhaps even marked, changes in climate might occur from an increasing greenhouse effect."
Keeling adds:
I too pondered the significance of returning a half billion years of carbon to the air…
Kit Stolz 