Charlie Keeling (Created The Keeling Curve) Dies At 77 - NYT

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"Dr. Charles D. Keeling, who set off current concerns of global warming through measurements beginning in the 1950's that showed steadily rising amounts of carbon dioxide in the air, died Monday at his home in Montana. He was 77. The cause was a heart attack after a short hike, said the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, where Dr. Keeling had long worked.

Carbon dioxide, which traps heat in the atmosphere, is one of the greenhouse gases, but when Dr. Keeling began his work, most scientists did not think that emissions from cars and factories could have a measurable effect on the earth's climate, assuming that nearly all the carbon dioxide would be absorbed by plants or the oceans. In 1955, Dr. Keeling camped out at Big Sur State Park in California, collecting samples of air in flasks to measure their carbon dioxide content. Three years later, he lugged the instrument for measuring carbon dioxide to a weather station, two miles up, on Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Carbon dioxide levels rise and fall over the course of a day, and his first measurement at Mauna Loa showed an average concentration of 315 parts per million. His measurements also showed that carbon dioxide levels rise and fall with the seasons, following the ebb and flow of vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere.

But his measurements also showed that carbon dioxide levels were rising year after year. That upward trend of carbon dioxide, known as the Keeling Curve, has now reached nearly 380 parts per million and is continuing to rise.

Dr. Keeling's work to establish long-term monitoring of carbon dioxide concentrations in a way that provided a running global average was simple in concept but profound in its impact, according to many climate experts. "It became clear very quickly that his measured CO2 increase was proportional to fossil fuel emissions and that humans were the source of the change," said Dr. James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "He altered our perspectives about the degree to which the earth can absorb the human assault." The current debate over global warming centers on how much warming the increased carbon dioxide will generate, but few have disputed Dr. Keeling's underlying carbon dioxide data."

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http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=43309