I am left feeling that
there is something a bit remiss in this story from San Diego’s UT
newspaper. The story concerns the work of Ralph Keeling, who is carrying on the
work of his father, the late Charles Keeling. The elder Keeling established the
measurement of atmospheric carbon dioxide atop Mona Loa in Hawaii back in the
1950s. The continued observations of increasing carbon dioxide are what is
known as the Keeling Curve and serve as some of the bedrock research upon which
the science of global warming is based.
As
to the science of global warming, Deborah Sullivan Brennan, the writer of the
story, gives us the following:
Most,
but not all, scientists believe global warming is accelerating and that human
activity plays a key role.
Although
the curve shows a consistent upward trend, its implications for climate are the
topics of ongoing debate. Uncertainties remain about carbon dioxide’s effects
on weather, precipitation and other facets of climate.
Maybe I’m being too
critical here, but it seems to me that Brennan is placing an emphasis on the
uncertainties of global warming. “Most, but not all, scientists believe global warming is
accelerating,” just strikes me as a needless way of emphasizing the beliefs of
a few contrarians—many of them on the payroll of fossil fuel industries or
their allied “think tanks”—who buck the scientific consensus of global warming.
Nowhere in the article does Brennan mention that the world’s temperatures have
risen in correspondence to the rise in CO2 that the Keeling Curve reveals.
Neither is there any mention that it is the burning of fossil fuels that throws
CO2 up in the air.
Most
of the article is a very pleasant profile of Ralph Keeling and his relationship
with his father, describing their shared interests in music and tinkering. If
that is the emphasis of the article, fine. This is from today’s paper, the
Sunday paper, which usually features a lot of human interest features. I don’t
object to that. But if you’re going to profile a son who is carrying on the scientific
work of his father, please, in the two or three paragraphs that describe the research that they share, get the science right.
And
as far as I’m concerned the reporter buried the lead of the story. The money
quote at the very end of the profile has Ralph Keeling saying: “Rising carbon
dioxide is not a threat to life. No one ever claimed that. It’s just a threat
to life as we know it.”
But then again it wouldn’t have been a very good human interest Sunday paper story if the
headline read: Prominent Scientist Says Global Warming Ends Life As We Know It.
