We Chat with Ralph Keeling of The Keeling(s) Curve re. Surfing, CO2 & How Bad It Could Get

"Because we know the flood is coming. The fire of all time is coming. We know the heat wave of all times is still coming. And we need to get ready for all those things."

Ralph Keeling is Director of the Scripps CO2 Program, which measures C02, oxygen and other gases at multiple stations around the globe.  He is a world expert in climate change and carbon sinks in the ocean and on land.  His father Charles Keeling started the monitoring program atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii, that from 1958 onward has measured the continuous buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere, a graph known as the Keeling Curve, one of the most important scientific works of the 20th Century.

I walk into Ralph’s office early in the morning. He looks like he’s been surfing.  Ralph, as you will see, is rather cheerful in the face of what others see as climate Armageddon.   Not because he doesn’t see the maelstrom coming.  He does.  With a clear eye based on data, he sees first what the news media will often quote later.  Ralph just seems to be a pretty cheerful person, is all. Maybe because at 65, he tries to surf every chance he can in front of his ocean-front office.

Steve: Surfing gives you executive ability as the psychologists say?

RALPH: Well, it’s just valuable to take your head off other things and give mind and body a reason to reboot. It’s a lovely place to be, out on the water.  You’re out hunting waves with a spear called a surfboard.

Primal.

RALPH: Very primal.

You’re not thinking of the chemistry of ocean-air interaction while you’re out there?

RALPH: Sometimes I get a little distracted by nature.

So, Ralph, are we in dire straits with climate change?

Things are not improving, that’s for sure.  We’re emitting CO2 into the atmosphere at the highest levels and at record rates.  We’re at the worst possible place we’ve been and moving in the wrong direction as fast as ever.  It’s really impossible to put a bright spin on that. 

(The Keeling Curve, one of the most important scientific works of the 20th Century)

Ten, twenty years ago people were not thinking wildfire as one of the big consequences of climate change, and yet out here in the West, forest fires and water shortage are now two big issues.  How do you adapt to living in a place that’s smoky for months of the year? That’s a big drag on the quality of life, and if that’s the new norm, it’s depressing.

And, of course, what we’ve experienced so far might not even be half of what it could turn into.  We’re only halfway into this mess.

I think you can start to be a little optimistic because the public’s woken up.  It’s obvious to people that the climate is changing in ways that are hurting them.  You can still walk around with your head in the sand and say it’s not happening but that contingent has to be shrinking, right? Of course, there’s propaganda being spewed out, so there’s people that could be convinced otherwise, but when your house burns down or there’s terrible floods or just scorching heat, well--

Studies show oxygen is dropping in tandem with CO2 rising. Is that a problem in your view?

RALPH: Oxygen is dropping in tandem, but not to the same equal amount. One way to look at it is that the changes in oxygen in tons of loss are bigger. But we're starting with so many more tons of oxygen in the atmosphere than CO2 in the atmosphere.  It's a much, much smaller percentage. And it's not really a health issue. I mean, we looked into that. We couldn't find any credible scenario where the oxygen loss would have close environmental concerns that merit a public reaction.

You had a short paper about plants taking up CO2. That sounds good, but not so good, right?

RALPH: The good side is that some of the CO2 that would have stayed in the air isn't in the air. It's tied up in plant tissues or in soils. We’ve benefited from that since CO2 levels have not risen as much as they otherwise would have. We don't quite know why that's happening because the processes that led to that uptake are still not fully understood. And as I said, there's room for surprises here, like the wildfires. Awareness of just how big a change fires are, that’s quite recent. Fires release carbon that was on the land and puts it right back in the atmosphere. So the landscape is not a great place to store lots of carbon because it's fuel, it's vulnerable, it's just sitting out there waiting to be broken down one way or another.

That's a good point, because people think about the damage to human life and structures, but they don't automatically think that all that carbon is being released.

RALPH: Yeah, that many years of accumulated carbon in the landscape, and it could literally go up in smoke.

Have you studied the Amazon in that regard?

RALPH: Not directly. My focus is global.  The Amazon is a small piece of the picture from my perspective.  A conversation that focuses on the land can distract us from the big picture, which is fossil fuels.  We are overwhelming the system with fossil fuel emissions and the land is only taking up a small piece of that.  We crank out some 37 billion tons of CO2 and the net effect of the land as a sink for that is like only a quarter, same with the oceans.  The land is important and interesting but it is not the big story.

I know there's a counter argument that says, “Oh, you have to start with the easy bits first. Let's ignore fossil fuel for a while and deal with the parts we can deal with. And then once we have trust, we can move on to fossil fuels.” I don't like that approach too much because it feels like it's letting the big problem go unaddressed.

What do you think your father would think about the public’s reaction to climate change and the science behind it?

Ralph Keeling with his father Charles Keeling at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1989

RALPH: My guess is he would be horrified by the politics right now. I mean, we scientists feel pretty powerless to do more than just keep doing our science and making sure some big thing isn't missed and then refining our understanding of the different pieces of the problem. The burden to change the political landscape isn't really ours. That's not our responsibility. That requires other voices. We're part of the story. Part of the message. But I don't fault scientists for not communicating better because that's not our main job. Our main job is to make sure we don't mess up.

I don't fault scientists for not communicating better because that's not our main job. Our main job is to make sure we don't mess up.

What are a couple of things that people wouldn't know about your father that you think are kind of cool?

RALPH: He did a lot of things besides the CO2 work. He was passionate about that and he recognized how important it was going to be. At the same time he was involved in the politics of where he lived, the little city of Del Mar. He helped the city shape its course, its master plan. He had an ability, to a weakness depending on how you looked at it, to really focus in single minded way on something to an almost obsessive degree.

Do you have any kind of a timeline to 1.5C? Some colleagues talk eight years plus or minus.

RALPH: I guess I don't like timelines.  We don't catch the train at 6:30, life is over, boy. Then you miss the train, and then you figure out what to do next, right? We’ve got to be prepared to miss a lot of trains, but hopefully catch a few, too.

What are the one or two things that we should focus on now?

RALPH: Electrification is happening and it’s big and needs all the boosts it can get. That is a way to decarbonize, and it needs a lot of infrastructure. The key is really the intersection between behavior and infrastructure because we're not going to change behaviors unless we have the infrastructure that makes it possible. And we're not going to invest in the infrastructure unless we have some people who are ready to change their behaviors. We get stuck on those two things.

There are easy things we should fix. Check those boxes. Just get them done. But don’t pretend like we’ve done very much doing that.

We’re locked into such massive changes that it'd be irresponsible not to be working really hard to get ready for them. We have to think about adaptation, resilience. Because we know the flood is coming. The fire of all time is coming. We know the heat wave of all times is still coming. And we need to get ready for all those things.

“We have to think about adaptation, resilience. Because we know the flood is coming. The fire of all time is coming. We know the heat wave of all times is still coming. And we need to get ready for all those things.”

There's no way to slow it down?

RALPH: No, Steve, we're locked into something pretty bad.  That’s not to say that taking the steps to reduce fossil fuels wouldn't prevent it from getting even worse, right?  So we still have control over the end game here, but the middle game is bad.

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