The Cold War Roots of Global Warming - Behind the Curve - page 22

to photosynthesis— and, by extension, essential to life on earth. Both
the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955 and the Clean Air Act of 1963 dealt
with toxic or noxious substances that had direct, typically local effects on
human health. 81 These substances emerged primarily from discernable
point sources— cars or factories— that government officials could regulate.
CO 2 , by contrast, was harmless at the local level. Only through complex
geophysical processes resulting from a global accumulation of the gas could
CO 2 impact human populations— hardly a phenomenon that state or fed-
eral governments were in a position to deal with. 82
Keeling's take on CO 2 came a long way between 1955 and 1963. In 1955,
Keeling was a newly minted chemistry Ph.D. walking in the woods around
Big Sur, probably trying to avoid his Cal Tech postdoctoral advisor Har-
rison Brown and thinking about how to translate measuring ground-level
CO 2 and its isotopes into camping trips in the forests of California. Keel-
ing's interest in CO 2 revolved around daily cycles of local plant respiration,
and at twenty-three years old he was beginning to be known as an expert
on the chemistry of forest air. 83 By 1963, Keeling was thinking much bigger,
reinterpreting CO 2 at a global level in a new way and for a new audience.
Still interested in forests and still passionate about spending time
outdoors, the Keeling of 1963 saw important physical and philosophical
connections between the increasingly popular concern over pollution and
the scientific interest in CO 2 accumulation. Increased atmospheric CO 2 ,
Keeling argued, might ultimately act similarly to pollution, albeit through
a more complex chain of causation. CO 2 could threaten human welfare
through a rise in sea level and might cause significant ecological and agri-
cultural disruption by warming the air and ocean sufficiently to change
patterns of plant growth and species distribution. 84 CO 2 interacted with
other fossil fuel pollutants— particularly sulfur dioxide— in unpredict-
able ways, further increasing the unpredictability of humans' impact on
the atmosphere. 85 “The potentially dangerous increase of CO 2 , due to the
burning of fossil fuels, is only one example of the failure to consider the
consequences of industrialization and economic development,” Keeling
wrote. 86 “It is almost impossible to predict all of the consequences of man's
activities. It is possible, however, to predict that there will be problems.” 87
In 1963, Keeling described CO 2 as a type of pollution, framing it within
the context of environmental problems for the first time. In 1965, the Presi-
dent's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) attempted to catalogue these