High up on the northern flank of the world’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa on Hawaii’s Big Island, lies an observatory that was first scraped into the black basalt by a young scientist, David Keeling.

Every hour since it was established in 1958, scientists have deployed their instruments to sip the clean air from the trade winds that flow across the Pacific, and they have tested the samples for carbon dioxide content. The chart they have so painstakingly built over those decades is now known as the Keeling Curve. It shows how during the northern summer, as plant life grows thicker and fuller, carbon dioxide concentrations reduce, only to rise again in the winter. Keeling’s observatory showed us how the earth itself draws breath.

Illustration by Simon Letch

And it shows us each year as we keep burning fossil fuels the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, from 313 parts per million when the observatory was established, to 426 ppm on the day of US President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, to 430.67 ppm on Wednesday, as Australia’s east coast reeled from compounding fires and floods of the sort predicted by climate scientists using, in part, data from Mauna Loa.

Married to readings of average temperatures, which lag but waltz ever upwards in harmony, the Keeling Curve is the world’s most simple and transparent illustration of climate change. The curve, and the field of climate science it accelerated, is not only one of the US’s great achievements and gifts to the world, but a demonstration of the efficacy of long-term and dedicated scientific practice.

Naturally, the Trump administration wants to destroy it.

In March, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency said it could save $US150,000 by ending the observatory’s lease on an office and in the administration’s midyear budget proposal, it flagged ending the organisation’s funding. The assault on the Mauna Loa Observatory is part of a far wider attack on climate science and action mounted by the Trump administration over the past year.

Some highlights: In April, the administration disbanded the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which had once been home to the climatologist James Hansen, whose 1988 testimony before Congress was key to introducing the world to the climate threat.

The Mauna Loa observatory is at risk from Trump administration budget cuts.Credit:

In August, Trump ordered a halt in the construction of the near-complete $US4 billion Revolution Wind project, a wind farm of 114 turbines off the coast of Rhode Island that by next year would have been providing enough electricity........

© The Sydney Morning Herald