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.

  • @EdibleFriend
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    648 months ago

    And nothing will happen to any of them

    • @[email protected]
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      238 months ago

      That’s not true. We continue to bend the rules further and further for them all the time. ':-(

    • DessertStorms
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      88 months ago

      Not if we continue to play by the rules they’ve all set for society…

      • Transporter Room 3
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        48 months ago

        Society exists because of social contracts.

        Social contracts require everyone to play by the accepted rules.

        They broke that contract long ago.

        • I Cast Fist
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          38 months ago

          They keep changing the rules because they have enough power/money to do so

    • @[email protected]
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      58 months ago

      That was 70 years ago, anyone who was old enough to have had any power is almost certainly deceased.