Charles David Keeling

An investment banker in Scranton, Pennsylvania got his five-year-old son interested in astronomy. His mother gave him music, and he became a good enough classical pianist to consider the career. Chemistry won. Keeling took his degree at the University of Illinois in 1948 and a doctorate under Malcolm Dole at Northwestern in 1953, where the expected next step was the oil industry. He had picked up most of an undergraduate geology course on the side, and applied for postdoctoral work almost exclusively to geology departments west of the continental divide. Harrison Brown, newly running a geochemistry department at Caltech, took him. There Keeling built the first instrument that could measure carbon dioxide in an air sample with consistently reliable accuracy, and went camping at Big Sur to use it.

Roger Revelle brought him to Scripps in 1956, and International Geophysical Year money paid for infrared analyzers. In March 1958 he began sampling on Mauna Loa, two miles up and far from vegetation, and in Antarctica. Then he checked every reading against the same reference gases, decade after decade, so that 1958 and 1998 mean the same thing. The curve rose and fell about six parts per million a year as Northern Hemisphere plants took carbon up each spring and released it each autumn — the planet breathing. Underneath that sawtooth it climbed. Both were there by 1961.

A long measurement series has no natural home in a grant system. Money follows new results, and a curve that does the same thing every year for four decades produces, by design, no new result — only a longer curve. The National Science Foundation stopped supporting the work in the early 1960s on the ground that the outcome had become routine, then used his numbers in a 1963 warning about heat-trapping gases. Cuts in the mid-1960s forced him to abandon continuous monitoring at the South Pole, and he scraped together enough money to keep Mauna Loa running. That was the rest of the career underneath the science: proposals, reviews, agencies, all to keep one instrument switched on. In 1998 he published his own account of it, titled Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth.

He measured until the end: a heart attack killed him in Hamilton, Montana on June 20, 2005, at 77. He had taken the National Medal of Science in 2002. His son Ralph Keeling runs the measurements now. The numbers: about 315 parts per million when Mauna Loa sampling began in 1958, 380 the year he died, past 400 since May 9, 2013. The curve is cast in bronze at Mauna Loa and carved into a wall at the National Academy of Sciences. Al Gore, who first saw it as a student in Revelle's classroom, put it in An Inconvenient Truth. What should be done about it is argued over in American politics. The record is replicated at about 100 sites.

Charles David Keeling's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Mauna Loa carbon dioxide record (the Keeling Curve) discovery
  Begun in March 1958 and still running — the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the world 1958
• The Antarctic carbon dioxide series discovery
  Started for the International Geophysical Year and abandoned in the mid-1960s when the funding went 1957
• The Concentration and Isotopic Abundances of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere other
  The first monthly records from Mauna Loa and Antarctica, reporting a seasonal cycle and a possible worldwide rise 1960
• The Concentration of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide in Hawaii other
  Written with Jack C. Pales — how the Mauna Loa measurements were actually made 1965
• Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth other
  His own account of 40 years of measurement and the money it took to sustain 1998

• 1948 aged ~20 Graduates in chemistry from the University of Illinois
• 1953 aged ~25 Takes a chemistry doctorate at Northwestern under Malcolm Dole Dole's graduates went almost as a rule into the oil industry. Keeling applied instead to geology departments west of the continental divide.
• 1956 aged ~28 Joins the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at Roger Revelle's urging He arrived with an instrument built at Caltech and with readings from Big Sur showing that carbon dioxide had risen since the 19th century.
• March 1958 aged 29 Begins continuous carbon dioxide sampling on Mauna Loa A parallel series had started in Antarctica the year before. The reading was about 315 parts per million.
• 1960 aged ~32 Publishes the first monthly records from Mauna Loa and Antarctica A distinct seasonal cycle and, possibly, a worldwide rise in carbon dioxide from year to year.
• 1961 aged ~33 Produces the data showing a steady year-on-year rise Three years of sampling had separated the annual breathing of the plants from the trend underneath it.
• Mid-1960s aged ~36 Funding cuts end the continuous South Pole record The National Science Foundation had already dropped support, calling the outcome routine. He found money elsewhere and kept Mauna Loa running.
• 2002 aged ~74 Receives the National Medal of Science The Blue Planet Prize had come in 1993 and the Tyler Prize would come in 2005.
• June 20, 2005 aged 77 Dies of a heart attack in Hamilton, Montana He had supervised the measurements for 47 years. His son Ralph Keeling took them over.

• Al Gore b. 1948
  Vice president and 2000 presidential candidate who became a leading advocate for climate policy. popularized his curve
• Harold Urey 1893–1981
  Discovered deuterium and founded cosmochemistry isotope geochemistry forerunner
• Marie Tharp 1920–2006
  Mapped the ocean floor by hand and found the Mid-Atlantic rift valley measured what nobody had measured
• Rachel Carson 1907–1964
  Marine biologist whose book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. contemporary