The Darwen lecture is held every year at Sidcot School, and in 2019 will be given by my brother Hammond Murray-Rust. "Algae, Sunshine and Snakes; threats to sustainability in Florida" . I have been invited to give a short 3 minute presentation on climate change
My father (David M Murray-Rust) was Headmaster of Sidcot School 1946-1957. He loved science, was a very careful experimenter and loved demonstrating and interpreting this to others, young and old. My short presentation on climate change ("The Keeling Curve") is given in his memory.
In 1958 Charles David Keeling started very careful measurements of the
Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. To avoid contamination from cities he set up his equipment at the top of an extinct Hawaian volcano
(3000m). Every month the data were recorded very accurately (in 1958 (I was 17) the first reading was 315.71 parts per million). The graph of monthly
variation is called the Keeling Curve.
In 1968 I was teaching chemistry to non-scientists and first saw the Keeling Curve; it was one of the "WOW!" moments of my life. As you can see the CO2 levels vary consistently throughout the year in a very systematic manner. Because the data were carefully collected Keeling could average this seasonal variation (in a the separate box) and be confident it was a real effect.
I hope by now you are asking questions like:
- why is the CO2 increasing every year?
- why is it getting even steeper?
- what causes the seasonal variation?
if so you are thinking as a scientist and my father would be proud of you.
This is a hard question. We need
- answers to the previous questions.
- even more data, because many of the causes and effects are related
- models so we can compute the future. (Computational weather forecasting was first proposed by Lewis Fry Richardson - a Bootham Scholar).
and
- how are humans going to react?
This is the hardest question of all.
I am a strong believer in Wikipedia and help to create bits of it. But before you rush off to "look up the correct answers" try to work out your own ideas of what is happening to CO2. And don't accept "facts" without understanding where they have come from.
To convince global politicians to act we need scientific data and scientific arguments to support political and economic action. But it's spread over many places and often not published properly (e.g. in PDF rather than data formats). With collaborators such as Simon Worthington (in TiB, Hannover) we are building software to read all the scientific journals and extract data relating to climate change which we will republish to the whole world.