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Climate Cafe Series, Playwright George Shea to present “Dr. Keeling’s Curve” – April 1st 2016

George Shea will play Dr. David Keeling, the scientist whose research on CO2 gave the world its first early warnings of global warming. The play brings to life the quirky and brilliant man who created the Keeling Curve, the iconic chart that illustrates the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels from 1958 to the present.

The story combines Keeling’s personal journey with the insights of atmospheric scientists who, hundreds of years earlier, made discoveries that laid the foundations for Keeling’s own extraordinary work. We meet Jean Joseph Baptiste Fourier whose obsession with heat led to an understanding of the greenhouse effect, and Svante Arrhenius who proved a link between global warming and CO2. The play paints very human portraits of these and other great scientists. 

Author, environmental activist, and journalist George Shea learned about global warming firsthand in the late 1980s from novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Shea envisioned Dr. Keeling’s Curve as an effective, entertaining way to explain global warming to a confused and badly misled American public.