50 Years of Continuous Measurement of CO2 on Mauna Loa
Name : 50 Years of Continuous Measurement of CO2 on Mauna Loa.
Category : Energy & Environment
Files Source: www.biokurs.de
File Added : July 23, 2010
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This online pdf file created by Ernst-Georg Beck, Dipl.Biol reprinted from Energy & Environment Volume 19 No. 7 2008. This paper talk about a short history of the mauna loa curve, the CO2 background hypothesis, CO2 measurement of the background before 1958, CO2 from mauna loa compare to other location, keeling, calendar and historical measurement, summary and perspective.
Content Summary :
“When the young chemist Charles Keeling measured the atmospheric CO2 concentration in the coastal forests of western USA in 1955, using a self-made manometer, he would have been astonished about the importance attributed to his data today. The Mauna Loa Curve that measures the CO2 concentration of air on the active volcano Mauna Loa, Hawaii (see fig.1), since 1958, is today regarded as the fever curve of the world. It stands for man-made climate change; a predicted change mankind is currently fighting with billions of dollars and growing business involvement. The Keeling Curve represents the life’s work of Prof. Dr. C. Keeling. He was awarded the National Medal of Science by president Bush in 2002. A building at the Mauna Loa Observatory bears his name today, showing a plaque with the curve engraved (see fig.1). C. Keeling died in 2005. His son Ralph Keeling is also a memberof the Scripps Research Institute in California as his father in former days and is working on atmospheric oxygen measurements. Roger Revelle, the former director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at La Jolla, California, U.S.A. agreed in 1956 to investigate the atmospheric CO2 concentrations. This enabled C. Keeling to start his measurement series on the largest volcano of the world, Mauna Loa in 1958. Keeling succeeded in convincing Revelle to buy an Ultramat 3 gas analyser made by Siemens, which was very expensive at that time [2, 3]. Only after the death of Keeling in 2005 this equipment was exchanged for a modern version.
Most interesting is the stimulation Keeling received from Gustav Arrhenius, a grandchild of the 1903 winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, Svante Arrhenius. Gustav Arrhenius was also a member of the Scripps Institute at that time. In 1896 his grandfather had tried for the first time to make a physical connection between the temperatures of the ice ages and the CO2 concentration of the air. But he did it in another way, as we know from the laws of nature. From Henry’s law of dissolution in water we know that carbon dioxide is voluntarily dissolving in water by setting free energy. And we know from the oxidation process as a fundamental energy supplying chemical reaction that CO2 is the final product in burning of organic matter accompanied by setting free heat. Arrhenius calculated that carbon dioxide as a low energy levelled product itself will produce heat by its emission. In fact the oceans as the largest store of CO2 need heat to set free carbon dioxide.”………Download for more information!!
