By Samantha Larson, March 24, 2014
It’s a tough world out there for a line chart. But, with big screen appearances in An Inconvenient Truth and PowerPoint presentations in classrooms across America, the Keeling Curve has earned its place as one of climate change’s most iconic stars.


But now the Keeling Curve, the longest-running record of atmospheric carbon dioxide may be coming to an end, thanks to budgetary distress.
Keeling Sr. struggled to maintain funding to keep his curve even back in the mid-1960s, but now financial troubles are reaching their most dire point yet, says Keeling Jr. His lab group, based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, has been trying to branch out from traditional sources of green, like the National Science Foundation, to modern approaches, like asking for donations via Twitter and their blog. These crowdfunding efforts have raised more than $17,000 so far — just a small portion of the program’s $1 million annual budget, but still a strong sign of public support — and they’re still accepting donations.
“The level of funding for science in this country has not grown sufficiently to keep up with the demand and need,” Keeling says.
While the Keeling Curve was the first to provide a long enough time series of atmospheric CO2 to correlate its rise with the burning of fossil fuels, it’s no longer the only group to track such trends. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now also gathers air samples from around the world to monitor greenhouse gas levels. So is the Keeling Curve still needed? Keeling argues that it is. “If you’re measuring something over time, as we are, you only get one chance to get it right,” Keeling says. “And the only way to be sure that you got it right is to do it more than one way … It’s really integral to having a good record to have some redundancy.”
Plus, Keeling says that his curve is still providing data that enables scientists to make new discoveries. In the last year, Heather Graven, a former post-doc in his group, used the data to publish a paper on how the annual swings in atmospheric CO2 are becoming more intense. “It catches us by surprise that the planet is changing that fast by that much,” Keeling says.
And the Keeling Curve has played a big role in convincing scientists and non-scientists alike that this whole climate-change thing is a pretty dire deal. Unfortunately, it’s only getting more so.