Paper short abstract:

While vision has been an organizing metaphor and dominating source of technological enhancement for modern science, in Dave Keeling's recounting of his development of CO2 measurement techniques, the essential metaphor is that of breathing.

Paper long abstract:

Dave Keeling is widely regarded as a central figure in climate change science during the latter half of the 20th century. In particular, he argued for and developed one of the central pillars of the anthropogenic hypothesis of global climate change, namely the measurement of global carbon dioxide levels known as the Keeling Curve. Since 1960, when Keeling first published systematic data documenting a rise in global CO2 levels, Earth's biospheric processes have been modeled in excruciating detail--with a remarkable degree of predictive capacity for such a chaotic system. While vision has been an organizing metaphor and dominating source of technological enhancement for modern science, in Dave Keeling's recounting of his development of CO2 measurement techniques, the essential metaphor is that of breathing. He experienced the continuous measurement of atmospheric CO2 as the Earth breathing. This experience also finds a mathematical expression in the decomposition of wave-forms that describe the patterns, permutations and fluctuations of atmospheric CO2 levels on diurnal, annual, decadal and trans-millennial cycles. Connecting with Joseph Fourier's treatment of sinusoidal waves, necessary for his original speculation on the 'temperature of the terrestrial sphere and interplanetary space,' it might be said that listening to the patterns of Earth breathing is a constitutive experience in the discovery of anthropogenic climate change.