Out for a walk in Big Sur

We camped this past weekend at Big Sur, meeting up with some friends from the north. I made the reservations in November and wasn’t really looking at the calendar, so I didn’t realize that the weekend was a nexus of holidays—Passover, Easter, Earth Day. It felt right, though, being under the trees and in the […]

Behind the Curve

The Keeling Curve—the sawtoothed upward slope of atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations—may be the world’s most famous scatter plot. The data that form the curve have been accumulating since the 1950s, when scientist Charles David Keeling set up his instruments at a geophysical observatory high on Mauna Loa, one of the massive volcanoes that form the Big […]