Graphs function plainly to summarize data. They hardly seem momentous. Unlike a famous discovery, whose significance is often marked by an eponymous name: Mendel’s laws, the Watson & Crick model of DNA, Darwinian theory. Who would name a mere graph? They seem mundane fragments of science, hardly worth celebrating. A notable exception, however, is the Keeling Curve (Figure 1). This “simple” graph depicts the steady rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere over the last half-century. It helps document how humans have transformed the atmosphere and, with it, the Earth’s temperature. The Keeling Curve is a linchpin in the evidence that humans have changed the planet’s climate.
The Keeling Curve starts in 1958 and continues uninterrupted for over five decades. The scale of the data is extraordinary, an ideal rarely realized in science. The “hard” data from real-time measurements show the...
University of California Press