Tim Lueker fiddles with some hissing lab equipment, then pours a container of liquid nitrogen into a small vat.
At minus 180 degrees Celsius, liquid nitrogen is cold enough to cryogenically burn skin. Lueker handles it as casually as if it were a pitcher of lemonade.
"We're cautious. But yeah, I do spill liquid nitrogen on myself every day, and I've been doing it for years, so over time, you do kind of get used to it," he said.
Next, Lueker grabs a slim glass tube. It looks empty to the untrained eye, but it's actually full of the invisible gases that make up Earth's atmosphere.
Lueker uses these air samples, many of which are collected on Hawaiʻi Island, to measure the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When Lueker dips the tube in liquid nitrogen, the carbon dioxide in the tube solidifies for a moment.
"You have to look fast, because see the white dot? That's frozen CO2," he explained. "That’s all it is. That little bit of carbon dioxide is what's going to change the climate on Earth for hundreds of years."
This procedure is a stripped-down version of how Lueker and his colleagues at the Keeling Lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego have been testing atmospheric carbon dioxide for decades.
Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. Research from the Keeling Lab has demonstrated that global carbon dioxide levels have been steadily rising for nearly 67 years.
It's one of the most important datasets on how humans are changing the climate.
For all that time, Hawaiʻi has been at the center of that research. That could soon change too.
Carbon dioxide monitoring starts on Maunaloa
Since 1958, instruments at NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory have taken nearly continuous measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Scientist Charles David Keeling used that data to plot what is now known as the Keeling Curve, which charts yearly increases in overall carbon dioxide levels. Those increases are a result of the burning of fossil fuels.
"It was never really in debate as to why it was rising, because we knew we were dumping so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," said Ralph Keeling, the son of Charles David Keeling.
In Ralph Keeling's lifetime, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen about 36%. He can tell that from looking at the Keeling Curve, since carbon dioxide measurements on Maunaloa started just one year after he was born.
Global carbon dioxide levels have broken a new record almost every year of Ralph Keeling's life.
Charles David Keeling meticulously maintained the Keeling Curve using data from Maunaloa until his death in 2005.
Ralph, who's also an atmospheric scientist and worked alongside his father at Scripps, made sure that work kept going.
"I couldn't bring myself to shut it down, because it seemed like it was too important," he said.
For the last 20 years, Ralph Keeling has worked in the same building at Scripps that his father did, processing data from the top of a mountain all the way across the Pacific to provide a lens into our changing climate.
Now, that work faces another turning point. The Trump administration has proposed funding cuts to NOAA that would shutter the observatory, as well as other hubs in the country's greenhouse gas monitoring network.
Congress is reviewing Trump's budget proposal. So far, U.S. lawmakers have left NOAA's budget largely intact.
NOAA declined to provide a comment on the legislation, citing internal policies.
Funding threats in the lab's early days
Charles David Keeling also contended with serious budget shortfalls during his time.
In 1963, just five years after carbon dioxide measurements on Maunaloa began, federal funding cuts to the U.S. Weather Bureau, which operated the Mauna Loa Observatory at the time, threatened to shut down a range of science projects at the top of the mountain.
Charles David Keeling appealed to the National Science Foundation for funding and was able to save his program.
When he reflected on the episode in his 1998 autobiography, Keeling wrote that he had "learned a lesson that environmental time-series programs have no particular priority in the funding world, even if their main value lies in maintaining long-term continuity of measurements."
Ralph Keeling said the challenge of communicating the importance of the Keeling Curve persists. He launched the Keeling Curve Foundation to garner support for sustained measurements of the environment.
"We absolutely depend on not just knowing what's happening now, but what's happened in the past so we have context," he said.
As the Mauna Loa Observatory's role as home for climate science is once again in jeopardy, Ralph Keeling said this time, it’s unclear who could step in to save the day if the station lost funding.
"The National Science Foundation was sitting there to help [in 1963]. There was a safety net. But the concern now is that there's also cuts to the National Science Foundation and to NASA and to NOAA, of course, which runs the observatory," he said. "Because it's across all disciplines, it feels like a bigger threat."
Ralph Keeling said that the closure of the Mauna Loa Observatory would be "a huge blow."
"I'm determined not to let it happen. In some way or another, we'll get through this," he said.
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