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Majid_S
Mountain climber
Bay Area
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Topic Author's Original Post - May 2, 2007 - 01:57pm PT
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Climate Change Is Clear Atop Mauna Loa
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9885767
Day to Day, May 1, 2007 · In the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore shows a graph of rising carbon-dioxide levels during the past several decades. The image is a striking illustration of how one greenhouse gas has poured into the world's atmosphere.
Watching the film, you might get the impression that the research behind that graph came from Roger Revelle, an eminent scientist who studied global warming. In fact, the work sprang from a brash young colleague named Charles David Keeling, and Revelle initially opposed his method.
Bucking the established scientific wisdom, Keeling wanted to set up his carbon-dioxide monitoring station in just one place, where he could get the cleanest air possible: on top of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano.
Despite a lack of enthusiasm from Revelle, Keeling began sampling the air at Mauna Loa in 1958. A few years after the data started coming in, Revelle conceded that his young protege was right — and that the data proved fossil fuels were causing global warming.
The Keeling Curve, as it came to be known, is the cornerstone of global-warming science today. Keeling died in 2005 — but other scientists, including his son Ralph, are continuing his research.
The Keeling Curve is dense, full of dips and spikes. But its visual impact — a steady upward line showing the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide — is simple and stark.
"You can look at [the curve] as a beautiful scientific record," says Ralph Keeling, "or you can look at it as an alarm bell." To many observers, it is both.
Ps
I personally know The Keeling family for more than 25 years and lived with them for few years in Del Mar, California. They are one of the greatest people I have ever known in my life, also great mountaineers as well. I remember once in summer of 1984, Dr. Keeling took me to his personal lab in Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla to show me his work and once I arrived, there were glass containers all over the place with labels saying “South pole”, “Kenya”, “Fiji Islands” etc. I asked Dr.Keeling why he had all these empty glass containers in his lab?.
He replied,” Majid,they are not empty, they are full of air samples, earth is heating up every day”.
Majid
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Thanks for posting that, Majid. And here it is, a view of the Keeling Curve.
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
Knob Central
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Why is it such a perfect squiggle only recording a rise every 3? years?
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Summers higher, winters lower. Each squiggle is a year.
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sonne
Trad climber
CA
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CO2 levels: summers are lower (plants use up CO2 in atmosphere for photosynthesis), winters are higher (most plants aren't photosynthetically active during the winter; plant CO2 respiration predominates)
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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sonne's explanation is correct. Mauna Loa CO2 readings tend to be highest in late spring (~June), and lowest at the end of the northern-hemisphere growing season in early fall (~September). So those squiggles fall more steeply than they rise.
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kelly slater
climber
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cnn 7pm 9 eastern tonight they have a show about global warming
hopefully these guys do it right
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hobo_dan
Trad climber
Minnesota
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The Keeling curve is considered the most important set of scientific data in the history of the world.
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L
climber
NoName City and It Don't Look Pretty
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Dang...this makes good old Al Gore look pretty spiffy, doesn't it?
I guess Glen Beck, Jody, TGT, Chaz, LEB and Mimi will just have to gnash their teeth while the program is on. Or better yet: Don't watch! Wouldn't want you to step into a reality paradox.
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TradIsGood
Happy and Healthy climber
the Gunks end of the country
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Gee, I wonder what that curve would look like if the x-axis were the world population?
Folks should definitely go read "The Logic of Failure - Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations, by Dietrich Dorner."
The thesis is that real world problems are systems that are very complex and non-linear; that they are very hard to understand; that people who attempt to solve them have a hard time doing so because of the inter-relationships between variables. Further those who think that they understand the systems best are often the worst at solving the problems. That focusing on single components of a system often leads to solutions that seem dramatically better in the short term, leading up to unpredictable catastrophic failure.
BTW. Graphs should be used to present data in an analog fashion. Truncating the y-axis exaggerates the change. It makes it appear that CO2 levels are multiples higher in 50 years rather than just a small percentage higher. This lets you see the little seasonality effects, (how many measurements / year?), but distorts the perception of change (Makes the elephant look like a mouse - geologists usually photograph rocks with a hammer so view can scale.)
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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TIG, you have no idea.
Meanwhile, here's the view from the South Pole.
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TradIsGood
Happy and Healthy climber
the Gunks end of the country
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Quack!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
The world population has more than doubled (219%) since 1960, yet the CO2 concentration has risen a mere 19% (119%) from these graphs.
(The numbers look nearly the same. - Are they?)
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Read some real science. You'll learn things.
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Kartch
climber
belgrade, mt
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That's pretty cool for his son to carry on the research. BTW I wonder how a son of an enviromental scientist rebels, do they buy big SUV's and refuse to recycle?
Also I'm no scientist but that graph seems pretty linear, I would have thought it would be exponential. Are annual adjustments applied to the graph or am I scientifically illiterate?
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TradIsGood
Happy and Healthy climber
the Gunks end of the country
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Chiloe, I have read a ton of "real science", and not just physics. The problem with real science may stem with the incredible successes of the last 3 centuries of physics, chemistry, and math. We all begin to get familiar with it from about middle school. Many, like I, even take it to the graduate level. The problem is that those successes tend to lead us to believe that all science works so perfectly.
Unfortunately, where in physics we have wonderful isolated laboratories with beautifully repeatable experiments, once we move into the global lab, we lose our laboratory. No repeatable tests of theory. It is almost like we are analyzing the stock market. We create a theory that matches the past and test it against the future. Worse still, we lose all control over the standard scientific methods of control variables and experimental variables. We have living populations to deal with, governments and cultures, economics, natural resource distributions, technological change, changing solar flux, chaotic / stochastic effects, boundary conditions that may or may not be actually measured, and so on.
After you have read the book, which I trust you will like, come back and say that all we need to know is science, and that we are measuring and accounting for all of the important variables and our models work perfectly now, and that the decisions that we make serially can all be anticipated today.
BTW, there is a great account of Chernobyl in there. Part of the cause for the disaster, ironically, is that a very select crew of technicians were operating the plant. They had selected the plant for experiments based upon the proven expertise of the operational staff. Human error was the sole cause of the failure.
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Wild Bill
climber
Ca
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TIG,
What in the world are you talking about?
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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TIG:
Chiloe, I have read a ton of "real science", and not just physics.
You most often address climate topics from a right-wing political perspective. Which ton of real science have you read on these topics?
Your comment about graphs and geologists was funny. Read it again and think of three reasons why.
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TradIsGood
Happy and Healthy climber
the Gunks end of the country
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Kartch, you would be better off expecting the graph to be "oscillatory" because the atmosphere is part of a system with a number of feedback mechanisms. If CO2 gets "too high" animals die, which might likely allow plants to grow more, which would then lead to a decrease in the CO2 percentage and increase in O2.
If you take a little tiny chunk of an oscillatory system - like say 50 years - it might look linear, or parabolic or whatever. If you took a few millions of years, it might look like a bumpy flat line.
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