Struggling for Air by Revesz Richard;Lienke Jack;

Author:Revesz, Richard;Lienke, Jack;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE CARBON LOOPHOLE: A HISTORY

The basic mechanics of the greenhouse effect have been understood since 1859, when a British scientist named John Tyndall performed a series of experiments demonstrating the capacity of CO2 (then known as carbonic acid) and certain other gases to absorb heat.10 Just shy of forty years later, a pair of Swedish scientists, Arvid Högbom and Svante Arrhenius, became the first to speculate that emissions of CO2 caused by burning fossil fuels might strengthen this greenhouse effect (and thus increase global average temperatures) by increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.11

But the technology necessary to test this theory—namely, instruments capable of measuring the level of CO2 in the atmosphere—wouldn’t arrive until the late 1950s. In 1958, an American chemist named Charles Keeling began to take continuous CO2 measurements from an observatory atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.12 Plotted on a graph, these data points formed what would eventually be known as the “Keeling Curve,” an upwardly sloping line that has continued its climb for almost six decades now—rising from 315 parts per million in 1958 to just over 400 parts per million in 2014.13 (Meanwhile, the preindustrial concentration of CO2 is believed to have been about 275 parts per million.14)

By 1965, Keeling had accumulated enough data for President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee to cite his findings in a report to the President as showing “clearly and conclusively” that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was rising.15 In the Committee’s view, industrial society was conducting “a vast geophysical experiment” with little understanding of the potential consequences:

Within a few generations, [humankind] is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years. The CO2 produced by this combustion is being injected into the atmosphere; about half of it remains there.16

The Committee projected a 25 percent increase in CO2 levels by the year 2100 and advised that such an increase “may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate.”17 But in the absence of more sophisticated atmospheric modeling techniques, it was “impossible to predict these effects quantitatively.”18

A year later, a report from the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Development offered a similar assessment of the state of climate science: “The net result is that we do know the carbon dioxide concentration has increased and is increasing. Once again, we do not know what this means or what to do about it if action is called for.”19 Presciently, the House report noted that if the harm of carbon dioxide emissions became clearer, the long-term desirability of coal as a fuel source would decrease:

The present investment in coal-fired electric generating plants, and the realistic cost differential between this and other energy sources, precludes any rapid demise of the coal industry. Further elucidation of the threat from carbon dioxide might alter this picture.20

But clarity on carbon was slow in coming.

Leon Billings, Senator Muskie’s longtime chief of staff, has written that he does “not recall any talk about global warming” when the Clean Air Act was passed, in 1970.

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