Jerome Whitington jw4948@nyu.edu DRAFT DO NOT CITE / DISTRIBUTE 1 Respiration: Keeling’s Curve and the Anthropology of the Anthropogenic Jerome Whitington, NYU Anthopology Abstract: Charles “Dave” Keeling is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 (CO2) 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 respiration. He experienced the continuous measurement of atmospheric CO2 as the Earth respiring. 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’s respiration is a constitutive experience in the discovery of anthropogenic climate change. Introduction: The Anthropogenic Hypothesis A prominent research article published last month, Sept 2017, in Nature Geosciences caused quite a stir in the global warming debates (Millar et al, 2017). It asked whether it was still technically possible to meet a key commitment reached under the Paris Climate Agreement. If we pulled out all the stops and got down to doing the hard work of reducing carbon emissions, the authors asked, is there still a way to keep Earth’s temperatures from going more than 1.5 Celsius over pre-industrial levels? Is there an emissions reduction pathway in which such a hopeful future could be achieved? The paper answered a tentative ‘yes,’ but they did so in such a way that climate denialists and contrarians got very excited. That is, their argument hinged on a claim that the climate models over-estimated the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to greenhouse