Keeling's Legacy - "Nature Doesn't Care How Hard We Tried" - NYT

MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii — Two gray machines sit inside a pair of utilitarian buildings here, sniffing the fresh breezes that blow across thousands of miles of ocean. They make no noise. But once an hour, they spit out a number, and for decades, it has been rising relentlessly.

The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego. His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science.

Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death, his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming. 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.

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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.”

But most scientists trained in the physics of the atmosphere have a different reaction to the increase. “I find it shocking,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the government monitoring program of which the Mauna Loa Observatory is a part. “We really are in a predicament here, and it’s getting worse every year.” As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time. “Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/science/earth/22carbon.html?_r=1

Stephen Hawking : The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

George Bernard Shaw : " Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. "

William Hazlitt : " There are many who talk on from ignorance rather than from knowledge, and who find the former an inexhaustible fund of conversation. "

Nature and the earth will continue to evolve and correct itself, and we humans are but another species that will be part of a long history of climatic extinctions... whether we get too hot and drown ourselves and run out of oxygen, or whether we have a rebound ice age is irrelevant... we are still screwn.

I weep for my children's generation, and feel gyped that my generation or the one before mine couldn;t make these changes in the 70's when the information first began to become visible... shit, even the 'inconvenient truth' wasn't enough to make a shift in how we behave as a species...
and now it is far too late.

if we get some serious melting and heat, i at least hope that means that the sierras will be warmer and i can have a longer growing season for veggies... that could be the only benefit i could forsee... and it wouldn't last long, cuz no doubt we'd run out of water...

Moreover, scientists say that an increase of five or six degrees is a mildly optimistic outlook. They cannot rule out an increase as high as 18 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet.


:popcorn:

-Laelth