December 17, 2010
Surprising Data in Real vs. Fake Christmas Tree Debate
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF
When it comes to Christmas trees, Americans increasingly prefer plastic pines over the real thing.
Sales of fake trees are expected to top 13 million this year, a new record, as quality improves and they get more convenient, with features like built-in lights and easy collapsibility. All told, well over 50 million artificial Christmas trees will grace living rooms and dens this season, according to the industry’s main trade group, compared to about 30 million real trees.
Kim Jones, who was shopping for a tree at a Target store in Brooklyn this week, was convinced that she was doing the planet a favor by buying a $200 fake balsam fir made in China instead of buying a carbon-sipping pine that had been cut down for one season’s revelry.
“I’m very environmentally conscious,” Ms. Jones said. “I’ll keep it for 10 years, and that’s 10 trees that won’t be cut down.”
But Ms. Jones and the millions of others buying fake trees might not be doing the environment any favors.
In the most definitive study of the perennial real vs. fake question, an environmental consulting firm in Montreal found that an artificial tree would have to be reused for more than 20 years to be greener than buying a fresh-cut tree annually. The calculations included greenhouse gas emissions, use of resources and human health impacts.
“The natural tree is a better option,” said Jean-Sebastien Trudel, founder of the firm, Ellipsos, that released the independent study last year.
The annual carbon emissions associated with using a real tree every year were just one-third of those created by an artificial tree over a typical six-year lifespan. Most fake trees also contain polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, which produces carcinogens during manufacturing and disposal.
Ellipsos specifically studied the market for Christmas trees bought in Montreal and either grown in Quebec or manufactured in China. Mr. Trudel said the results would likely differ for other cities and regions. Excessive driving by consumers to purchase real trees could tip the scales back in favor of artificial trees, at least in terms of carbon emissions.
Over all, the study found that the environmental impact of real Christmas trees was quite small, and significantly less than that of artificial trees — a conclusion shared by environmental groups and some scientists.
“You’re not doing any harm by cutting down a Christmas tree,” said Clint Springer, a botanist and professor of biology at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “A lot of people think artificial is better because you’re preserving the life of a tree. But in this case, you’ve got a crop that’s being raised for that purpose.”
Makers of fake trees argue that the environmental evidence isn’t quite so clear-cut.
“If you buy an artificial Christmas tree and reuse it for at least five years, it’s absolutely a green thing to do,” said Thomas Harman, founder and chief executive of Balsam Hill, a maker of premium artificial trees. Mr. Harman said that the average amount of car travel by consumers to buy a real Christmas tree outweighed the added energy and pollution costs of buying an artificial tree from China.
The American Christmas Tree Association, the main trade group for artificial tree makers and retailers, says its own study found that it took 10 years of use before a fake tree became better for the environment than a real one, at least in terms of carbon emissions.
Yet the tradeoffs are not immediately apparent to consumers and even some tree growers.
On a bitterly cold afternoon at the Winter Market at New York City’s Union Square this week, Lizza Stanley browsed for Christmas trees with her husband, Brian. They wondered if an artificial tree would be better for the environment because it could be reused time and time again.
The tree seller, Rob Rodriguez from Van Houten Farms of Orangeville, Pa., was of little help. “I don’t even know for sure," Mr. Rodriguez said. “I would guess natural?”
The balance tilts in favor of natural Christmas trees because of the way they are grown and harvested.
Close to 400 million trees now grow on Christmas tree farms in the United States, according to the National Christmas Tree Association, which represents growers and retailers of real trees. About 30 million trees are harvested annually.
The living trees generate oxygen, help fix carbon in their branches and in the soil and provide habitat for birds and animals, Mr. Springer said.
Christmas tree farms also help preserve farmland and green space, particularly near densely populated urban areas where pressure for development is intense.
“It allows people with land that may not be the best farmland to have a crop that they can actually make a profit on, and not be under pressure to sell out to developers,” said Mike Garrett, owner and operator of a Christmas tree farm in Sussex, N.J.
After the holidays, real trees can continue to serve a purpose. New York City, for instance, offers free curbside recycling for trees, which are turned into compost. The city’s parks department also provides a free mulching service for trees at several locations after the holidays. In 2009, nearly 150,000 trees were composted or mulched in the city.
Artificial trees, by contrast, are manufactured almost exclusively in Asia from plastic and metal and cannot by recycled by most municipal recycling programs. After six to 10 years of use, most will end up in a landfill.
Melly Garcia, who bought a six-foot fir on the Upper East Side of Manhattan this week, said she was certain that the real tree was the correct environmental choice.
“The trees are coming from a sustainable place, and if you dispose of it properly, it goes back to the earth,” she said. “So I’m at peace with that.”
Jami Warner, executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association, the group promoting artificial trees, said that neither kind of tree had much of an impact on the environment — “especially when compared to something that most of us do every day, like drive a car,” she wrote in an e-mail.
On that point, Mr. Trudel of Ellipsos agrees.
“When you really consider it, if you exchange a couple of days of commuting by car with carpooling or riding a bicycle, you’ll completely overcompensate for whatever the impact of the tree is,” he said. “It’s not such a big deal. Enjoy your tree, whichever one you prefer.”
@sumac,
Wow, California's stormin'! Cold rain, snow at about 4000 ft and dropping.
Yesterday sunshine, so finished shopping and Christmas mailing...have a few more things to accomplish when venturing outdoors again Monday. That is if the driveway from the garage isn't frozen. yikes
Making stew with onions...does that count? Well, to late cause i definitely have the flu. yuk Feeling tired w/ acidy tummy. Thank God i still have a few anti nausea pills left over from surgery. burp
Sue, saw a news report today that new electric cars made in the U.S. are selling fairly well. They get 100 miles per charge, and are probably the same size as the old VW cars were in the 70's. If people enjoy driving small cars, and don't commute more than a few miles each day, they'll luv the new technology.
Pres Obama talked today about how U.S. students are falling way behind with math and science. Until we can get public education moving in the right direction, we're in a world of hurt technologically. It isn't that our kids arn't smart either. A damned shame how the system was allowed to falter.
Course, if the United States doesn't get off its duff and begin pushing the private sector to change policies from soot to green, we won't have a world to worry about.
Dan, hope you and Pattie are staying warm, and you too Sue!
Have a safe week all ~
@danon5,
Alls well cept there's a huge wind/rain storm happenin'! Snow levels dropping...and praying I can travel Christmas Day.
No tree indoors for me this year...watching all the pines dancin' and hoofin' outdoors...decided another tree didn't need to be uprooted. We lost 10 neighborhood trees to the drought...and sooooooooo happy water sheds, plants and trees are finally receiving water!
There are a ton of pine needles covering everything...and storm debri here and there, but no damage to the house.
Sue, you mentioned your kitchen and i gotta tell you, if i could take the house kitchen...move it...disgard it...i'd be happy. Cabinets are made of particle board and painted with the stuff that looks like wood grain. yuk
So, away with the wallpaper, lino, and wood that isn't! shoot
Anyhooo, wildclickers, gotta finish baking Christmas cookies and argue with babies who still want outside during a storm. Good God.
Dan, you must have a flying-through-a-hurricane-story. waiting
tap
tap
tap
@Stradee,
Well, OK.............
One day while flying in the Nam I wanted to land at a small field on the west side of the country where the 4th Inf Div HQ was located. The day was VERY windy and the wind direction was perpendicular to the landing runway. 90 degrees!! I dragged out the old flying book for the airplane and looked up the limits it would land in wind. It said I could land it at a max of 60 knots (about 69 mph) at that angle of wind. So I lined my plane up with the runway and had to tip my wing on the windy side really downward to keep the plane in line with it. Things went ok and I touched down on my right main landing gear and rolled on with the other gear still in the air until it wouldn't stay up any longer. By that time I had slowed the plane down to where I could safely steer it with rudder and brakes.
So there ya go - my windy tale.........
Aha! Trivia!!
Chicago is known as the Windy City. Bet ya didn't know that it has nothing to do with actual wind. The two biggest rivals to host the World's Fair - Columbian Exposition in 1893 began dialog long before that date. They were New York City and Chicago. The Chicagoans gave such a long and continuous roar that a New York reporter touted them as being very windy with their dialogue. That started the public to begin calling them "windy" for their talking so much. True story
Good clicking all......................
@danon5,
oye...that's one hellava cross wind landing!!!!!!!!!! Good job!
Ah, the windy city that is but isn't. Very funny story.
Recall seeing a play in Chicago with a friend, and it wasn't the wind so much as the wind chill. Damn that's a very cold city during wintertime.
Have a good evening all, and stay warm
December 19, 2010
There Goes the Sun
By RICHARD COHEN
WHAT is the winter solstice, and why bother to celebrate it, as so many people around the world will tomorrow? The word “solstice” derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still), and reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter when, at dawn for two or three days, the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.
Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer. The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause. ... Pleasing, that idea. ... As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”
Virtually all cultures have their own way of acknowledging this moment. The Welsh word for solstice translates as “the point of roughness,” while the Talmud calls it “Tekufat Tevet,” first day of “the stripping time.” For the Chinese, winter’s beginning is “dongzhi,” when one tradition is making balls of glutinous rice, which symbolize family gathering. In Korea, these balls are mingled with a sweet red bean called pat jook. According to local lore, each winter solstice a ghost comes to haunt villagers. The red bean in the rice balls repels him.
In parts of Scandinavia, the locals smear their front doors with butter so that Beiwe, sun goddess of fertility, can lap it up before she continues on her journey. (One wonders who does all the mopping up afterward.) Later, young women don candle-embedded helmets, while families go to bed having placed their shoes all in a row, to ensure peace over the coming year.
Street processions are another common feature. In Japan, young men known as “sun devils,” their faces daubed to represent their imagined solar ancestry, still go among the farms to ensure the earth’s fertility (and their own stocking-up with alcohol). In Ireland, people called wren-boys take to the roads, wearing masks or straw suits. The practice used to involve the killing of a wren, and singing songs while carrying the corpse from house to house.
Sacrifice is a common thread. In areas of northern Pakistan, men have cold water poured over their heads in purification, and are forbidden to sit on any chair till the evening, when their heads will be sprinkled with goats’ blood. (Unhappy goats.) Purification is also the main object for the Zuni and Hopi tribes of North America, their attempt to recall the sun from its long winter slumber. It also marks the beginning of another turning of their “wheel of the year,” and kivas (sacred underground ritual chambers) are opened to mark the season.
Yet, for all these symbolisms, this time remains at heart an astronomical event, and quite a curious one. In summer, the sun is brighter and reaches higher into the sky, shortening the shadows that it casts; in winter it rises and sinks closer to the horizon, its light diffuses more and its shadows lengthen. As the winter hemisphere tilts steadily further away from the star, daylight becomes shorter and the sun arcs ever lower. Societies that were organized around agriculture intently studied the heavens, ensuring that the solstices were well charted.
Despite their best efforts, however, their priests and stargazers came to realize that it was exceptionally hard to pinpoint the moment of the sun’s turning by observation alone — even though they could define the successive seasons by the advancing and withdrawal of daylight and darkness.
The earth further complicates matters. Our globe tilts on its axis like a spinning top, going around the sun at an angle to its orbit of 23 and a half degrees. Yet the planet’s shape changes minutely and its axis wobbles, thus its orbit fluctuates. If its axis remained stable and if its orbit were a true circle, then the equinoxes and solstices would quarter the year into equal sections. As it is, the time between the spring and fall equinoxes in the Northern Hemisphere is slightly greater than that between fall and spring, the earth — being at that time closer to the sun — moving about 6 percent faster in January than in July.
The apparently supernatural power manifest in solstices to govern the seasons has been felt as far back as we know, inducing different reactions from different cultures — fertility rites, fire festivals, offerings to the gods. Many of the wintertime customs in Western Europe descend from the ancient Romans, who believed that their god of the harvest, Saturn, had ruled the land during an earlier age of abundance, and so celebrated the winter solstice with the Saturnalia, a feast of gift-giving, role-reversals (slaves berating their masters) and general public holiday from Dec. 17 to 24.
The transition from Roman paganism to Christianity, with its similar rites, took several centuries. With the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, customs were quickly appropriated and refashioned, as the sun and God’s son became inextricably entwined. Thus, although the New Testament gives no indication of Christ’s actual birthday (early writers preferring a spring date), in 354 Pope Liberius declared it to have befallen on Dec. 25.
The advantages of Christmas Day being celebrated then were obvious. As the Christian commentator Syrus wrote: “It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same Dec. 25 the birthday of the sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity .... Accordingly, when the church authorities perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.”
In Christendom, the Nativity gradually absorbed all other winter solstice rites, and the co-opting of solar imagery was part of the same process. Thus the solar discs that had once been depicted behind the heads of Asian rulers became the halos of Christian luminaries. Despite the new religion’s apparent supremacy, many of the old customs survived — so much so that church elders worried that the veneration of Christ was being lost. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo and Pope Leo the Great felt compelled to remind their flocks that Christ, not the sun, was their proper object of their worship.
While Roman Christianity was the dominant culture in Western Europe, it was by no means the only one. By millennium’s end, the Danes controlled most of England, bringing with them “Yule,” their name for winter solstice celebrations, probably derived from an earlier term for “wheel.” For centuries, the most sacred Norse symbol had been the wheel of the heavens, represented by a six- or eight-spoked wheel or by a cross within a wheel signifying solar rays.
The Norse peoples, many of whom settled in what is now Yorkshire, would construct huge solar wheels and place them next to hilltop bonfires, while in the Middle Ages processions bore wheels upon chariots or boats. In other parts of Europe, where the Vikings were feared and hated, a taboo on using spinning wheels during solstices lasted well into the 20th century. The spinning-wheel on which Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger may exemplify this sense of menace.
Throughout much of Europe, at least up until the 16th century, starvation was common from January to April, a period known as “the famine months.” Most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed over the winter, making the solstice almost the only time of year that fresh meat was readily available. The boar’s head at Christmas feasts represents the dying sun of the old year, while the suckling pig — with the apple of immortality in its mouth — the new.
The turning of the sun was perhaps even more important in the New World than the Old. The Aztecs, who believed that the heart harbored elements of the sun’s power, ensured its continual well-being by tearing out this vital organ from hunchbacks, dwarves or prisoners of war, so releasing the “divine sun fragments” entrapped by the body and its desires.
The Incas would celebrate the solar festival of Inti Raymi by having their priests attempt to tie down the celestial body. At Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes, there is a large stone column called the Intihuatana, (“hitching post of the sun,”) to which the star would be symbolically harnessed. It is unclear how the Incas measured the success of this endeavor, but at least the sun returned the following day.
Yet above all other rituals, reproducing the sun’s fire by kindling flame on earth is the commonest solstice practice, both at midsummer and midwinter. Thomas Hardy, describing Dorset villagers around a bonfire in “The Return of the Native,” offers an explanation for such a worldwide phenomenon:
“To light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of men when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, ‘Let there be light.’ ”
So there is good reason to celebrate the winter solstice — but maybe that celebration is still touched with a little fear.
Richard Cohen is the author of “Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life.”
Fabulous story below.
December 20, 2010
After Oil Spill Crisis, a Protector Keeps Watch
By DAN BARRY
CARLISLE, La.
A daughter of Plaquemines Parish, her camouflage outfit the color of the forest, checks the oil. She checks the steering, the coolant, the gas. She makes sure that everything is tied down or stored away, so that nothing loose will fly into the fanlike propeller at the rear of her airboat. “Maintenance,” she says. “Maintenance.”
Then off she roars, a singular woman named Albertine Marie Kimble, guiding her airboat across the grass and into the precious marsh waters, where she is most at home. An honor guard of green-winged teal ducks rises to greet her, the only resident of this southeastern Louisiana spot called Carlisle.
“Wow!” she shouts. “Whee-e-e-e!”
The BP oil spill of 2010 has come and gone, mostly. The cleanup armies have been reduced to platoons, the oil company’s public-relations blitz has lost its apologetic urgency, and you have to know where to look to find any remnants of the catastrophe. But Albertine Kimble, protector of these waters, is still here; she has neither forgotten nor forgiven.
She is not an oil rigger, or an oysterman, or a shrimper. She is the coastal program manager for Plaquemines Parish, tending to its wounded banks. She is also the parish itself, rooted generations-deep in its soft soil, an outdoorswoman living in a remote mobile home raised nine feet off the ground by creosote poles and galvanized girders.
Ms. Kimble may be the best duck hunter around — so good that she wonders whether it’s why she remains single. She can dress a bagged deer, then dress up for a night at the Ritz-Carlton in New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina sent waters high enough to flood her elevated home, she spent nearly a year retrieving the scattered coffins disinterred by the deluge and returning the dead to their places of rest.
“I’ve been here forever,” says Ms. Kimble, 49, who has long brown hair and, somewhere on her person, a .38.
Ms. Kimble takes it personally when weekend warriors carve illegal swaths through marsh to reach their hunting camps. So imagine how she felt when a man-made, man-killing catastrophe in April began spilling millions of gallons of crude oil into the sensitive waterways of the Gulf of Mexico, including those of Plaquemines Parish.
Imagine, too, her reaction to the lawsuit filed last week by the federal government, alleging that BP and other companies had not used the safest drilling technology, and had failed to take proper precautions. It’s all about the money, she says in disgust. All about testosterone. All about — lack of maintenance.
Plaquemines Parish is so quiet now it almost seems that the nation only dreamed of a massive spill. The television klieg lights are gone, along with many of the “vessels of opportunity” and most of the boom. Most of the BP contingent is gone as well, following a farewell party or two at the Venice marina, at the bottom of the parish, where the dark-blue waters beckon.
The marina’s manager, Chris Calloway, says that the only obvious evidence of the oil spill now are the new trucks and boats owned by the “spillionaires” — people who struck it rich by renting out their boats and land and services for BP’s cleanup operation that lasted months. Oh, and the occasional strip of forgotten boom, and the patches of dead marsh grass here and there.
The dead marsh vegetation, though, says it all for Ms. Kimble.
The Louisiana coast already has profound problems with erosion — with the vanishing of land — thanks to several factors: The great Mississippi River flood of 1927. The water-diversion projects that altered the delivery of the river’s silt and freshwater, allowing Gulf of Mexico saltwater to eat away at the protective marsh grass. The wells and boat canals carved into the marshes by oil companies over the decades.
Then came the oil spill, insidious now in its quiet presence. Ms. Kimble recently went out to examine the aftermath, from the brown, dead marsh grass in Bay Jimmy to the malodorous oil found with a shovel’s nudge in the beach sand at South Pass. The ducks rising in her honor may be virgin white, but what dark damage has been done beneath the water’s surface? To the shrimp, the oysters, the marsh grass that provides coastal protection?
“Where did it go?” she asks about the oil. “Can you account for all of it?”
The matter is deeply personal because Ms. Kimble is so deeply embedded in the narrow strip of Plaquemines that runs between the Mississippi’s eastern bank and Breton Sound. She went to Louisiana State University to study music therapy, but came home before graduating to help care for her ailing father, Gerald, the parish comptroller and parish bugler — the “Al Hirt of the Cut Grass,” he was called.
She started working for the parish 26 years ago, spraying pesticide out of airboats for $3 an hour, then moving up to other assignments — so many, in fact, that she has trouble remembering them all (“Oh, and I was with the mounted police.”). At every step, she made sure to challenge the male-dominant culture. When she was hired as a harbor patrol deckhand, for example, she responded to a barge’s pictorial array of naked women by hanging up a photographic celebration of naked men. That ended that.
Ms. Kimble used to live three miles from here, until someone broke in one night and tried to assault her; her bullets missed their fleeing mark, she says — unfortunately. She later moved her trailer to Carlisle, where the Kimbles go way back. And way back is where she settled, far from the road and nine feet in the air, guarded always by Hunter, a rescued Labrador retriever that she nursed to good health.
“Maintenance,” she says again.
Here, in Ms. Kimble’s raised nest, among live oak and cypress trees, the motif is camouflage chic. Her cozy living room features an alligator’s head and various mounted ducks, including two named Fred and Ethel. Hurricane Katrina’s waters stopped just short of that crucifix on the wall, she says, as she serves coffee in cups of fine china.
It’s funny, she says. Her daddy died in June 2005. A few months later, Katrina altered her world. Then she spent all that time putting her dead neighbors back in the ground. But by the beginning of this year, life in the parish seemed to have found a proper balance between oil and water.
She distinctly remembers having this thought while at the Assumption of Our Lady Mission, the Roman Catholic church in Braithwaite where she sings soprano, plays the flute and says the Hurricane Prayer. She remembers being happy.
“Everything was looking so good,” she says.
Today, eight months after the catastrophe, Ms. Kimble allows that things look good again in Plaquemines Parish — but only on the surface. “It’s going to come up again,” she says, of the oil, the anger, the consequences.
So this daughter of the parish tends to her maintenance. The other day, she helped to plant 2,500 stalks of marsh grass along a canal. At Mass on Christmas Eve, she will be playing her flute and singing “O Holy Night.” And then, well before the Christmas sunrise, she expects to be out again on these precious waters, hunting duck and attaching a wish to every falling star.
I woke up in the middle of the night to go look at the lunar eclipse. I did not see any orange or red, but it was interesting.
December 20, 2010
Celestial Holidays
This is it, the shortest day of the year, the longest night. Winter, which begins Tuesday at 6:38 p.m. Eastern time, will get no darker than this. Slowly, inexorably, the days will begin to yawn wider and wider, and night will begin to contract. The change is just a few seconds at first — New Year’s Eve in Manhattan will be only 28 seconds longer than Christmas Eve. By mid-March, the days will be growing by some 2 minutes and 40 seconds apiece, and then the rate of change slows again until late June.
We come to the winter solstice with mixed feelings. It will be lovely to have more light in the day. But there’s something equally wonderful about these long hibernal nights. By 4:30 every day — just as the sun is disappearing — we start to feel a little ursine, ready to dig a hole and sleep away the winter. How different our species would be if only we’d learned that one great trick!
We are all deeply habituated, in this northern clime, to the annual accordioning of the day — so much so that an equatorial place like Quito, Ecuador, where the length of day changes only by a second from solstice to solstice, sounds almost like a city out of science fiction. In some ways, that daily constancy seems more disorienting here, where the length of day changes by almost six hours, than the reversal of seasons in the Southern Hemisphere, where Christmas comes in summer.
Another important astronomical holiday follows soon after the winter solstice (which included a lunar eclipse). At 2 p.m., New York time, on Jan. 3, the Earth reaches perihelion — the closest approach to the Sun in our elliptical orbit, a little more than 91 million miles away. For some reason, this is a moment that goes uncelebrated, entirely unheralded. So we say to you all, Merry Solstice and have a Happy Perihelion!
Long article but easy reading.
December 21, 2010
A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning
By JUSTIN GILLIS
MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii — Two gray machines sit inside a pair of utilitarian buildings here, sniffing the fresh breezes that blow across thousands of miles of ocean.
They make no noise. But once an hour, they spit out a number, and for decades, it has been rising relentlessly.
The first machine of this type was installed on Mauna Loa in the 1950s at the behest of Charles David Keeling, a scientist from San Diego. His resulting discovery, of the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, transformed the scientific understanding of humanity’s relationship with the earth. A graph of his findings is inscribed on a wall in Washington as one of the great achievements of modern science.
Yet, five years after Dr. Keeling’s death, his discovery is a focus not of celebration but of conflict. It has become the touchstone of a worldwide political debate over global warming.
When Dr. Keeling, as a young researcher, became the first person in the world to develop an accurate technique for measuring carbon dioxide in the air, the amount he discovered was 310 parts per million. That means every million pints of air, for example, contained 310 pints of carbon dioxide.
By 2005, the year he died, the number had risen to 380 parts per million. Sometime in the next few years it is expected to pass 400. Without stronger action to limit emissions, the number could pass 560 before the end of the century, double what it was before the Industrial Revolution.
The greatest question in climate science is: What will that do to the temperature of the earth?
Scientists have long known that carbon dioxide traps heat at the surface of the planet. They cite growing evidence that the inexorable rise of the gas is altering the climate in ways that threaten human welfare.
Fossil fuel emissions, they say, are like a runaway train, hurtling the world’s citizens toward a stone wall — a carbon dioxide level that, over time, will cause profound changes.
The risks include melting ice sheets, rising seas, more droughts and heat waves, more flash floods, worse storms, extinction of many plants and animals, depletion of sea life and — perhaps most important — difficulty in producing an adequate supply of food. Many of these changes are taking place at a modest level already, the scientists say, but are expected to intensify.
Reacting to such warnings, President George Bush committed the United States in 1992 to limiting its emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Scores of other nations made the same pledge, in a treaty that was long on promises and short on specifics.
But in 1998, when it came time to commit to details in a document known as the Kyoto Protocol, Congress balked. Many countries did ratify the protocol, but it had only a limited effect, and the past decade has seen little additional progress in controlling emissions.
Many countries are reluctant to commit themselves to tough emission limits, fearing that doing so will hurt economic growth. International climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, this month ended with only modest progress. The Obama administration, which came into office pledging to limit emissions in the United States, scaled back its ambitions after climate and energy legislation died in the Senate this year.
Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science. Some of the Republicans who will take control of the House of Representatives in January have promised to subject climate researchers to a season of new scrutiny.
One of them is Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California. In a recent Congressional hearing on global warming, he said, “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.”
But most scientists trained in the physics of the atmosphere have a different reaction to the increase.
“I find it shocking,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the government monitoring program of which the Mauna Loa Observatory is a part. “We really are in a predicament here, and it’s getting worse every year.”
As the political debate drags on, the mute gray boxes atop Mauna Loa keep spitting out their numbers, providing a reality check: not only is the carbon dioxide level rising relentlessly, but the pace of that rise is accelerating over time.
“Nature doesn’t care how hard we tried,” Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist, said at a recent seminar. “Nature cares how high the parts per million mount. This is running away.”
A Passion for Precision
Perhaps the biggest reason the world learned of the risk of global warming was the unusual personality of a single American scientist.
Charles David Keeling’s son Ralph remembers that when he was a child, his family bought a new home in Del Mar, Calif., north of San Diego. His father assigned him the task of edging the lawn. Dr. Keeling insisted that Ralph copy the habits of the previous owner, an Englishman who had taken pride in his garden, cutting a precise two-inch strip between the sidewalk and the grass.
“It took a lot of work to maintain this attractive gap,” Ralph Keeling recalled, but he said his father believed “that was just the right way to do it, and if you didn’t do that, you were cutting corners. It was a moral breach.”
Dr. Keeling was a punctilious man. It was by no means his defining trait — relatives and colleagues described a man who played a brilliant piano, loved hiking mountains and might settle a friendly argument at dinner by pulling an etymological dictionary off the shelf.
But the essence of his scientific legacy was his passion for doing things in a meticulous way. It explains why, even as challengers try to pick apart every other aspect of climate science, his half-century record of carbon dioxide measurements stands unchallenged.
By the 1950s, when Dr. Keeling was completing his scientific training, scientists had been observing the increasing use of fossil fuels and wondering whether carbon dioxide in the air was rising as a result. But nobody had been able to take accurate measurements of the gas.
As a young researcher, Dr. Keeling built instruments and developed techniques that allowed him to achieve great precision in making such measurements. Then he spent the rest of his life applying his approach.
In his earliest measurements of the air, taken in California and other parts of the West in the mid-1950s, he found that the background level for carbon dioxide was about 310 parts per million.
That discovery drew attention in Washington, and Dr. Keeling soon found himself enjoying government backing for his research. He joined the staff of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in the La Jolla section of San Diego, under the guidance of an esteemed scientist named Roger Revelle, and began laying plans to measure carbon dioxide around the world.
Some of the most important data came from an analyzer he placed in a government geophysical observatory that had been set up a few years earlier in a remote location: near the top of Mauna Loa, one of the volcanoes that loom over the Big Island of Hawaii.
He quickly made profound discoveries. One was that carbon dioxide oscillated slightly according to the seasons. Dr. Keeling realized the reason: most of the world’s land is in the Northern Hemisphere, and plants there were taking up carbon dioxide as they sprouted leaves and grew over the summer, then shedding it as the leaves died and decayed in the winter.
He had discovered that the earth itself was breathing.
A more ominous finding was that each year, the peak level was a little higher than the year before. Carbon dioxide was indeed rising, and quickly. That finding electrified the small community of scientists who understood its implications. Later chemical tests, by Dr. Keeling and others, proved that the increase was due to the combustion of fossil fuels.
The graph showing rising carbon dioxide levels came to be known as the Keeling Curve. Many Americans have never heard of it, but to climatologists, it is the most recognizable emblem of their science, engraved in bronze on a building at Mauna Loa and carved into a wall at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.
By the late 1960s, a decade after Dr. Keeling began his measurements, the trend of rising carbon dioxide was undeniable, and scientists began to warn of the potential for a big increase in the temperature of the earth.
Dr. Keeling’s mentor, Dr. Revelle, moved to Harvard, where he lectured about the problem. Among the students in the 1960s who first saw the Keeling Curve displayed in Dr. Revelle’s classroom was a senator’s son from Tennessee named Albert Arnold Gore Jr., who marveled at what it could mean for the future of the planet.
Throughout much of his career, Dr. Keeling was cautious about interpreting his own measurements. He left that to other people while he concentrated on creating a record that would withstand scrutiny.
John Chin, a retired technician in Hawaii who worked closely with Dr. Keeling, recently described the painstaking steps he took, at Dr. Keeling’s behest, to ensure accuracy. Many hours were required every week just to be certain that the instruments atop Mauna Loa had not drifted out of kilter.
The golden rule was “no hanky-panky,” Mr. Chin recalled in an interview in Hilo, Hawaii. Dr. Keeling and his aides scrutinized the records closely, and if workers in Hawaii fell down on the job, Mr. Chin said, they were likely to get a call or letter: “What did you do? What happened that day?”
In later years, as the scientific evidence about climate change grew, Dr. Keeling’s interpretations became bolder, and he began to issue warnings. In an essay in 1998, he replied to claims that global warming was a myth, declaring that the real myth was that “natural resources and the ability of the earth’s habitable regions to absorb the impacts of human activities are limitless.”
Still, by the time he died, global warming had not become a major political issue. That changed in 2006, when Mr. Gore’s movie and book, both titled “An Inconvenient Truth,” brought the issue to wider public attention. The Keeling Curve was featured in both.
In 2007, a body appointed by the United Nations declared that the scientific evidence that the earth was warming had become unequivocal, and it added that humans were almost certainly the main cause. Mr. Gore and the panel jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize.
But as action began to seem more likely, the political debate intensified, with fossil-fuel industries mobilizing to fight emission-curbing measures. Climate-change contrarians increased their attack on the science, taking advantage of the Internet to distribute their views outside the usual scientific channels.
In an interview in La Jolla, Dr. Keeling’s widow, Louise, said that if her husband had lived to see the hardening of the political battle lines over climate change, he would have been dismayed.
“He was a registered Republican,” she said. “He just didn’t think of it as a political issue at all.”
The Numbers
Not long ago, standing on a black volcanic plain two miles above the Pacific Ocean, the director of the Mauna Loa Observatory, John E. Barnes, pointed toward a high metal tower.
Samples are taken by hoses that snake to the top of the tower to ensure that only clean air is analyzed, he explained. He described other measures intended to guarantee an accurate record. Then Dr. Barnes, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, displayed the hourly calculation from one of the analyzers.
It showed the amount of carbon dioxide that morning as 388 parts per million.
After Dr. Keeling had established the importance of carbon dioxide measurements, the government began making its own, in the early 1970s. Today, a NOAA monitoring program and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography program operate in parallel at Mauna Loa and other sites, with each record of measurements serving as a quality check on the other.
The Scripps program is now run by Ralph Keeling, who grew up to become a renowned atmospheric scientist in his own right and then joined the Scripps faculty. He took control of the measurement program after his father’s sudden death from a heart attack.
In an interview on the Scripps campus in La Jolla, Ralph Keeling calculated that the carbon dioxide level at Mauna Loa was likely to surpass 400 by May 2014, a sort of odometer moment in mankind’s alteration of the atmosphere.
“We’re going to race through 400 like we didn’t see it go by,” Dr. Keeling said.
What do these numbers mean?
The basic physics of the atmosphere, worked out more than a century ago, show that carbon dioxide plays a powerful role in maintaining the earth’s climate. Even though the amount in the air is tiny, the gas is so potent at trapping the sun’s heat that it effectively works as a one-way blanket, letting visible light in but stopping much of the resulting heat from escaping back to space.
Without any of the gas, the earth would most likely be a frozen wasteland — according to a recent study, its average temperature would be colder by roughly 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But scientists say humanity is now polluting the atmosphere with too much of a good thing.
In recent years, researchers have been able to put the Keeling measurements into a broader context. Bubbles of ancient air trapped by glaciers and ice sheets have been tested, and they show that over the past 800,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air oscillated between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Just before the Industrial Revolution, the level was about 280 parts per million and had been there for several thousand years.
That amount of the gas, in other words, produced the equable climate in which human civilization flourished.
Other studies, covering many millions of years, show a close association between carbon dioxide and the temperature of the earth. The gas seemingly played a major role in amplifying the effects of the ice ages, which were caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit.
The geologic record suggests that as the earth began cooling, the amount of carbon dioxide fell, probably because much of it got locked up in the ocean, and that fall amplified the initial cooling. Conversely, when the orbital wobble caused the earth to begin warming, a great deal of carbon dioxide escaped from the ocean, amplifying the warming.
Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, refers to carbon dioxide as the master control knob of the earth’s climate. He said that because the wobbles in the earth’s orbit were not, by themselves, big enough to cause the large changes of the ice ages, the situation made sense only when the amplification from carbon dioxide was factored in.
“What the ice ages tell us is that our physical understanding of CO2 explains what happened and nothing else does,” Dr. Alley said. “The ice ages are a very strong test of whether we’ve got it right.”
When people began burning substantial amounts of coal and oil in the 19th century, the carbon dioxide level began to rise. It is now about 40 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution, and humans have put half the extra gas into the air since just the late 1970s. Emissions are rising so rapidly that some experts fear that the amount of the gas could double or triple before emissions are brought under control.
The earth’s history offers no exact parallel to the human combustion of fossil fuels, so scientists have struggled to calculate the effect.
Their best estimate is that if the amount of carbon dioxide doubles, the temperature of the earth will rise about five or six degrees Fahrenheit. While that may sound small given the daily and seasonal variations in the weather, the number represents an annual global average, and therefore an immense addition of heat to the planet.
The warming would be higher over land, and it would be greatly amplified at the poles, where a considerable amount of ice might melt, raising sea levels. The deep ocean would also absorb a tremendous amount of heat.
Moreover, scientists say that an increase of five or six degrees is a mildly optimistic outlook. They cannot rule out an increase as high as 18 degrees Fahrenheit, which would transform the planet.
Climate-change contrarians do not accept these numbers.
The Internet has given rise to a vocal cadre of challengers who question every aspect of the science — even the physics, worked out in the 19th century, that shows that carbon dioxide traps heat. That is a point so elementary and well-established that demonstrations of it are routinely carried out by high school students.
However, the contrarians who have most influenced Congress are a handful of men trained in atmospheric physics. They generally accept the rising carbon dioxide numbers, they recognize that the increase is caused by human activity, and they acknowledge that the earth is warming in response.
But they doubt that it will warm nearly as much as mainstream scientists say, arguing that the increase is likely to be less than two degrees Fahrenheit, a change they characterize as manageable.
Among the most prominent of these contrarians is Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who contends that as the earth initially warms, cloud patterns will shift in a way that should help to limit the heat buildup. Most climate scientists contend that little evidence supports this view, but Dr. Lindzen is regularly consulted on Capitol Hill.
“I am quite willing to state,” Dr. Lindzen said in a speech this year, “that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon, though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.”
The Fuel of Civilization
While the world’s governments have largely accepted the science of climate change, their efforts to bring emissions under control are lagging.
The simple reason is that modern civilization is built on burning fossil fuels. Cars, trucks, power plants, steel mills, farms, planes, cement factories, home furnaces — virtually all of them spew carbon dioxide or lesser heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
Developed countries, especially the United States, are largely responsible for the buildup that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution. They have begun to make some headway on the problem, reducing the energy they use to produce a given amount of economic output, with some countries even managing to lower their total emissions.
But these modest efforts are being swamped by rising energy use in developing countries like China, India and Brazil. In those lands, economic growth is not simply desirable — it is a moral imperative, to lift more than a third of the human race out of poverty. A recent scientific paper referred to China’s surge as “the biggest transformation of human well-being the earth has ever seen.”
China’s citizens, on average, still use less than a third of the energy per person as Americans. But with 1.3 billion people, four times as many as the United States, China is so large and is growing so quickly that it has surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest overall user of energy.
Barring some big breakthrough in clean-energy technology, this rapid growth in developing countries threatens to make the emissions problem unsolvable.
Emissions dropped sharply in Western nations in 2009, during the recession that followed the financial crisis, but that decrease was largely offset by continued growth in the East. And for 2010, global emissions are projected to return to the rapid growth of the past decade, rising more than 3 percent a year.
Many countries have, in principle, embraced the idea of trying to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, feeling that any greater warming would pose unacceptable risks. As best scientists can calculate, that means about one trillion tons of carbon can be burned and the gases released into the atmosphere before emissions need to fall to nearly zero.
“It took 250 years to burn the first half-trillion tons,” Myles R. Allen, a leading British climate scientist, said in a briefing. “On current trends, we’ll burn the next half-trillion in less than 40.”
Unless more serious efforts to convert to a new energy system begin soon, scientists argue, it will be impossible to hit the 3.6-degree target, and the risk will increase that global warming could spiral out of control by century’s end.
“We are quickly running out of time,” said Josep G. Canadell, an Australian scientist who tracks emissions
In many countries, the United States and China among them, a conversion of the energy system has begun, with wind turbines and solar panels sprouting across the landscape. But they generate only a tiny fraction of all power, with much of the world’s electricity still coming from the combustion of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.
With the exception of European countries, few nations have been willing to raise the cost of fossil fuels or set emissions caps as a way to speed the transformation. In the United States, a particular fear has been that a carbon policy will hurt the country’s industries as they compete with companies abroad whose governments have adopted no such policy.
As he watches these difficulties, Ralph Keeling contemplates the unbending math of carbon dioxide emissions first documented by his father more than a half-century ago and wonders about the future effects of that increase.
“When I go see things with my children, I let them know they might not be around when they’re older,” he said. “ ‘Go enjoy these beautiful forests before they disappear. Go enjoy the glaciers in these parks because they won’t be around.’ It’s basically taking note of what we have, and appreciating it, and saying goodbye to it.”
On Dec. 11, another round of international climate negotiations, sponsored by the United Nations, concluded in Cancún. As they have for 18 years running, the gathered nations pledged renewed efforts. But they failed to agree on any binding emission targets.
Late at night, as the delegates were wrapping up in Mexico, the machines atop the volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean issued their own silent verdict on the world’s efforts.
At midnight Mauna Loa time, the carbon dioxide level hit 390 — and rising.
