A coalition of oil and car manufacturing interests provided $13,814 (about $158,000 or £125,000 in today's money) in December 1954 to fund Keeling's earliest work in measuring CO₂ levels across the western US, the documents reveal.
Keeling would go on to establish the continuous measurement of global CO₂ at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The Keeling curve
has tracked the steady increase of the atmospheric carbon that drives the climate crisis and has been hailed as one of the most important scientific works of modern times.
The fossil fuel interests backed a group, known as the Air Pollution Foundation, that issued funding to Keeling to measure CO₂ alongside a related effort to research the smog that regularly blighted Los Angeles at the time. This is earlier than any previously known climate research funded by oil companies.
In the research proposal for the money-uncovered by Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center, and published by the climate website DeSmog - Keeling's research director, Samuel Epstein, wrote about a new carbon isotope analysis that could identify "changes in the atmosphere" caused by the burning of coal and petroleum.
Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm the climate crisis would wreak, only to deny this science for decades and fund continuing efforts to delay action.
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