Global Warming Is Crap!

“Global warming?” says Steve Wampler. “Crap!”

This is unexpected because Steve trained as an environmental engineer at UC Davis.

But he’s serious. “There are 100,000 scientists out there who are saying it’s total crap too, but they get shunned, swept under the carpet because all this ‘global warming’ stuff is just money-making scare tactics. They prevent the opposing view from ever getting a fair hearing.”

Steve. What a contradiction. I thought he’d be a global-warming shoo-in, a great first interview on my mission to find out what green San Diegans are doing, post-Copenhagen, to save the world. To undo — uninvent — global warming. Because it turns out (who knew?) that San Diego invented global warming, or at least discovered a way of understanding it.Just over 50 years ago, in March 1958, Charles Keeling of UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography set up camp on the summit of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. His idea was to take daily measurements of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, to see if that number was increasing as a result of humanity’s use of fossil fuels.

And over the course of 50 years, the figures tell us it was. Keeling’s graph does one sexy curve up, up, and up. Each notch equals more CO₂ in every molecule of air. The Keeling curve “marked a key moment in American science history,” says Scripps, commemorating the anniversary in an article on its website. It’s “become one of the iconic images of science, rivaling the double helix, or Darwin’s sketches of finches…. It turned speculations about increasing CO₂ from theory into fact.”

So the question is: With all the urgent calls from Copenhagen, can San Diego help lead the world back from the brink? It turns out that our fair city bristles with experts and activists, from Keeling’s son Ralph, also a climate scientist at UCSD, to Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who discovered the “ABC” — atmospheric brown clouds — clouds loaded with industrial soot that cause a reduction in solar radiation at the ocean surface.