Carbon Dioxide 420.

420.52 ppm. That's the current number, as of three days ago. When Charles David Keeling hired me as a post-doc in 1985 (my first job after college), the CO₂ concentration at Mauna Loa observatory was hovering around 345 ppm. That's an increase of more than 20% in a little over 35 years. Boy, do I feel old. It wasn't supposed to rise so quickly. Yes, it's a nice smooth curve that doesn't seem to be accelerating or decelerating, but what about everything we understood back in 1985. Didn't anybody read the National Academy of Sciences reports on global warming back in the 1970s? Didn't anybody notice that the rise in atmospheric CO₂ didn't really get started until we all started burning fossil fuels in the second half of the 19th century? By the way, the predominant product of the combustion of hydrocarbons in an oxygen atmosphere is carbon dioxide, and CO₂ is well known to be able to trap heat more effectively than most of the other gases in the atmosphere, like nitrogen, oxygen, and argon.

It was more than 100 years ago that Svante Arrhenius predicted global temperatures would rise as the CO₂ concentration rose. None of this deserved any dispute. It was just science. Predictions were easy. Exact forecasts, however, are never easy when it comes to complex phenomena with fuzzy boundaries, like the Earth's climate. So what? We knew enough back then to figure out how to ameliorate the problem. Burning less fuel would have been a good start. Our strategies toward the end of the 1970s seemed solid and hopeful. Decreasing speed limits to 55 mph, putting solar panels on the White House, to set an example for us all how we could avoid the national insecurity that resulted on our reliance on foreign oil. Didn't Reagan care about keeping our freedoms and national security intact?

It all seemed so simple back in 1985. The problems were solvable. Nobody expected the campaigns against common sense by the oil companies and their supporters. Nobody expected that the American people were stupid enough to buy into their anti-science agenda. It was as if all the flunkies who didn't pay attention in science class had gained a new champion: the selfish right wing politicians who couldn't see (or didn't want to see) past today's profits.

Argh. Enough for today. This is worth more writing, but who cares about this stuff nowadays? Everybody is distracted by the current event headlines of the day. It's too hard for most people to think about where we're heading, when life today doesn't seem fair or honest or hopeful or whatever. Is it supposed to be fair or honest? Maybe not. I'm always hopeful. Whatever...