Climate Scientist Ralph Keeling Makes Crowdfunding Plea to Back Key Research
Ralph Keeling, the director of an acclaimed Scripps program that keeps track of the amounts of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere, has renewed his plea for public support of the research, which has suffered from flagging federal grants.
"The Scripps CO2 and O2 measurements now face severe funding challenges," Keeling wrote in a letter posted on Dec. 24. "The situation is most urgent for the O2 measurements. These measurements have been supported for decades through proposals submitted every few years to the federal agencies. The value of these measurements is not questioned, but federal funding for these programs has never been so tenuous."
The famous Keeling Curve sampling program at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii was set up by his father, Dave Keeling, in the late 1950s and has tracked atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide ever since. But the part of the work that is less familiar to many—and that is in more dire economic straits—is the tracking of oxygen concentrations.
"The need to continue these measurements has not diminished. The planet is undergoing dramatic changes, unprecedented for millions of years. This past year, our group reported that CO2 topped 400 parts per million at Mauna Loa for the first time. We also reported a shockingly large and unexpected increase in the seasonal swings in CO2 between summer and winter at high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. The boreal forests are evidently behaving very differently than 50 years ago. Meanwhile, the oceans are acidifying, ice is melting, sea level is rising, the frequency of extreme storms seems to be increasing. Scientists from around the world are scrambling to figure out what is going on and what the future holds, as CO2 continues to rise."
http://insideclimatenews.org/content/climate-scientist-ralph-keeling-makes-crowdfunding-plea-back-key-research
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