Among climate scientists, Charles David Keeling and the Keeling Curve are famous, even revered. Walk into the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, D.C., and you’ll find one wall shows Darwin’s finches, next to a double helix of DNA, and, beside that, the Keeling Curve: a graph depicting the steep increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the course of the past half-century.
The Sierra Club will host a one-night-only production of “Dr. Keeling’s Curve” starring “MASH” TV star Mike Farrell about the scientist who alerted the world to climate change, Charles David Keeling. The one-man-show will be produced 7 p.m. Sept. 30 at the Broad Theatre in Santa Monica. Click here to buy tickets.
Yet Keeling and his work are largely unknown, even to most educated Americans, a fact that typifies the general ignorance about climate change. The saddest irony of Keeling’s obscurity is that the Keeling Curve makes climate change so terribly understandable.
Its message proclaims the one most basic fact of global warming: carbon dioxide levels have been climbing and are continuing to rise at an extraordinary and accelerating pace. Revealed by the graph of Keeling’s measurements, it is a message that can’t be missed by anyone of reasonable intelligence.
Science historian Spencer Weart, author of “The Discovery of Global Warming,” recognizes Keeling as the one most important person in the entire history of climate change discovery. “Had it not been for Keeling,” says Weart, “it might have been another 10 or 20 years before we knew about it at all.”
Before Keeling came on the scene in 1955 as a 27-year-old post-doc at Caltech, climate science was a chaotic, misguided business, carried on mostly in Sweden with haphazard results running a gamut from 150 ppm (parts per million) at its low end to 450 ppm at its highest.
The belief was that there were separate air masses of varying carbonic intensity all over the planet. To make matters worse, measurements were carried out by different technicians using different equipment to take measurements at different times of day in different locations, ranging from pristine high elevations in nature to the polluted centers of gritty overpopulated urban locations.
Keeling quickly rejected the Swedish model and invented a greatly simplified one of his own, using simple uniform equipment operated by the same technician, (usually himself) and always in the same locations, in pristine locations in nature.
He quickly discovered that the same air currents travelled across the oceans and visited every corner of the planet. And he found there was a single CO2 number at any given moment for the entire planet.
More than six decades ago when Keeling began his measurements, the number was 310 ppm. In April, it’s expected to reach 411 ppm. More than half the increase noted over the past 120 years has taken place in the last 25 years.
Future projections, based on the current level of CO2 rise, forecasts that carbon dioxide by 2050 will rise to 600 ppm.
In 2011, it occurred to Studio City playwright and Sierra Club memberGeorge Shea that telling Keeling’s story offered a simple, highly accessible way to explain climate change to a general audience.
He decided that a one person play about Keeling would go a lot further if he could find a well known actor to play Keeling. On a gray, rainy January day, he stumbled across a neighbor, Mike Farrell who, in his eight years on the TV show “MASH,” had become known to TV viewers all over the planet.
Farrell said he would consider playing Keeling but added: “It can’t be a dry academic lecture. It has to be entertaining.” He and Shea went back and forth for six months and came up with a script they both liked. At times it was very funny but it did what it was intended to do: explain global warming.
“The first two-thirds of the play has never changed,” Shea said. “It tells the story of Keeling’s life. But the last third always needs to be updated. It’s a very fluid situation now that is constantly changing with new and often disturbing developments happening all the time. It’s a very scary time. That’s why I wrote it and Mike agreed to do it. He’s perfect as Keeling — and funny at the same time.”