Documents show industry-backed Air Pollution Foundation uncovered the severe harm climate change would wreak

The fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents have shown, including the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called ‘Keeling curve’ that has charted the upward march of the Earth’s carbon dioxide levels.

A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 in today’s money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling’s earliest work in measuring CO2 levels across the western US, the documents reveal.

Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This ‘Keeling curve’ has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.

  • alvvayson@lemmy.world
    3·
    9 months ago

    The real problem is that there is no one we can vote for that can make a difference.

    One half of the politicians want to continue using fossil fuels.

    And the other half wants to do mostly virtue signalling with policies that look good on paper, but won’t actually solve the problem.

    I guess the second group is less bad, but politics is unlikely to save the climate.

    Sorry, don’t have a solution. We could have solved it by continuing to deploy and develop nuclear after Chernobyl, but by now it seems like 2 or 3 degrees of warming is inevitable.

    • Coreidan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      In other words our leadership is greedy and they only care about their own comfort at the expense of everyone else.

      They know they’ll die long before any of this affects them.

      They don’t give a fuck about their own grand children, which should tell you everything about what kind of people they are.