Column When you don't like the message, what do you do? You shoot the messenger, of course.
That's the strategy being employed by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration as it works to avoid, ignore, or bury data that prove the reality of anthropogenic global warming and its evil twin climate change.
Case in point: The Trump administration recently released its draft budget [PDF] for the country's premier analytical agency focused on Earth systems, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Among the many cuts to NOAA research proposed in the draft was one that would represent a death blow to the Mauna Loa Observatory, the source of the data fueling the most iconic chart in all of climate research, the time-honored and justly venerated Keeling Curve.
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This chart, begun by young researcher Charles David Keeling way back in 1958, chronicles the seasonal rise and fall – and unrelenting upward spiral – of the most abundant and consequential greenhouse gas heating our planet: carbon dioxide (CO 2 ).
The iconic Keeling Curve – the irrefutable bearer of hard-to-swallow facts for those who claim that carbon dioxide can't be exacerbating global warming.
Keeling measured greenhouse gases from near the peak of 13,678-foot (4,169 meter) Mauna Loa, Hawaii, because it is far from localized interference by our CO 2 -spewing civilization. His early measurements found the gas accounted for about 315 parts per million (PPM) in Earth’s atmosphere, significantly above the estimated 275 ppm preindustrial average. Thanks to its careful annual updating, the Keeling Curve chart now shows an inexorable CO 2 climb to just under 425 ppm. This year it slipped briefly above 430 ppm for the first time. The growing atmospheric saturation of carbon dioxide is unarguable.
So what? Well, so this: These data are closely correlated with the rise in global temperatures that NOAA, NASA, the UK Met Office, Berkeley Earth, the Japan Meteorological Agency, and others have meticulously recorded in the ensuing seven decades. During that time, Keeling's data have helped climate science to perfect its ability to provide support for the causation that would unarguably couple with that correlation.
This causative linkage is now abundantly clear – as equally clear are the current U.S. administration's anti-science "Drill, baby, drill!" efforts to suppress any contradictory data, no matter how reputable.
Perhaps a refreshing review of the science supporting global warming might here be useful. First, it must be emphatically stated that global warming per se is most definitely a good thing. In moderation, that is. The problem is, as with so many good things in life, indulging in too much of a good thing – think alcohol or Marmite – can lead to disaster. And so it is with greenhouse gasses.
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