If our global reaction to Covid is any guide, we'll ignore the warnings about Climate Change until they're undeniably upon us – at which point people will say, "how did no one warn us about this?" Unfortunately, barring any yet-to-be-invented technologies, by that point the worst effects will be irreversible.
I'd love to be wrong on this one. But the sky turned orange for a week last year, as wildfires tragically demolished entire communities just 35 minutes by car from where I sit. EPA didn't know how to classify the air quality. There were so many fires up and down the West Coast last year they started simply numbering them, or labeling them as whole collections. Here in the PNW we've had a shockingly hot and dry spring, with ominous implications for this summer.
I'll leave you with this: check out 'The Carbon Farming Solution'. It's an incredibly well-researched book. It's in my wheelhouse, but I think it would appeal to a lot of you here (and yes, I've mentioned it a bunch of times before.) It goes both wide and deep on many aspects of land-use change, and is sober and realistic in what we can hope to achieve through better land-stewardship, and rethinking our food system.
2: Please don't waste time arguing with me about how 'there have always been wildfires'. What we're facing now is incomparable to the annual burns that used to happen here hundreds of years ago – though prescribed burns to reduce fuel load are certainly something we should be trying to do.
400-1,000ppm Concentrations typical of occupied indoor spaces with good air exchange
1,000-2,000ppm Complaints of drowsiness and poor air.
2,000-5,000 ppm Headaches, sleepiness and stagnant, stale, stuffy air. Poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart rate and slight nausea may also be present.
5,000 Workplace exposure limit (as 8-hour TWA) in most jurisdictions.
>40,000 ppm Exposure may lead to serious oxygen deprivation resulting in permanent brain damage, coma, even death.
> Perched on a barren volcano in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Mauna Loa observatory is a benchmark sampling location for CO2. It’s ideally situated for sampling well-mixed air- undisturbed by the influence of local pollution sources or vegetation, producing measurements that represent the average state of the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere.
It is just scary. In my own life time, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has risen by over 90ppm. Humanity has increased the carbon content by 40ppm before my birth, and 90ppm after. Since my youth, temperatures in Europe have risen by over 1 degree.
This is serious. I'm sure that this will have and is likely already having some serious impact on humans that we don't know much about despite what the studies claim.
I wonder if it might slow metabolism and increase obesity levels. There were some strange stories a few years ago about a study that concluded it wasn't just humans that have gotten fatter in recent times, but wild animals too. Even laboratory animals kept under supposedly identical conditions have gotten fatter. I am sure you can look up the reports if you google.
> "The ultimate control knob on atmospheric CO2 is fossil-fuel emissions,” said Ralph Keeling. “But we still have a long way to go to halt the rise, as each year more CO2 piles up in the atmosphere. We ultimately need cuts that are much larger and sustained longer than the COVID-related shutdowns of 2020."
This may not be the most constructive comment on HN, but my initial reaction to this kind of comment is often:
It is what it is; mother nature doesn't give a fuck about us and never will. Preventing climate change would be incredibly painful, as is letting it happen.
Compared to the seriousness of the problem I don't think it's extreme, but I also don't think it's quite the right approach. Instead of telling people to drive less, or eat less, or not heat their homes in the winter (which isn't going to work), we can transition away from fossil fuel energy as fast as we can and replace it with renewables.
My usual (U.S. centric) suggestions when this topic comes up are to greatly expand solar and wind energy production, finance transcontinental high-voltage DC lines so that we can trade power with Africa/Asia/Europe and even out the day/night imbalance (we can keep fossil fuel plants around as an emergency backup and just not use them), electrify the interstate freeway system so that EVs can charge without stopping and make cross-country road trips without having to haul around huge batteries, and we should expand EV tax credits to cover conversions of existing vehicles as well as new vehicles.
We also need more battery production, especially of technologies like lithium iron phosphate (or whatever replaces it in the future) which are good enough and aren't bottlenecked on expensive materials like cobalt and nickel.
None of these things require people to change their behavior, though it would help if they did. It's probably also not enough to save us from pretty severe climate problems in the future, but at this point I think that's more-or-less unavoidable so we should just do the best we can right now.
Nature does not match her challenges to our abilities. There’s no reason to expect this to be fair.
It’s definitely not the kind of thing where I would engage in hand wringing over human stupidity. It sucks and it’s unfair, but it’s the situation we have to deal with.
As others have pointed out in the comments, the implications of humans breathing carbon in the range of ~1000 ppm is minor.
However, I am terrified of some recent science indicating that carbon levels ~1200 ppm may prevent marine stratus clouds from forming, which would result in an additional 8 degrees C of warming very quickly (on top of the ~4 degrees we already expect at that level of carbon). [0]
In fact, there is evidence in the geological record that this terrifying increase in warming at not-that-high levels of carbon concentration is real, and has happened before. More terrifying, the estimated carbon ppm at that time was only 600.[1]
I don't know what the error bars are on the caltech climate study; 1200 seems like maybe I won't be around for it but 600 I definitely will be.
This very depressing number should be on the mast-head of every news paper/web along side the covid statistics. One good thing about covid was a distraction from climate depression.
> "The ultimate control knob on atmospheric CO2 is fossil-fuel emissions,” said Ralph Keeling. “But we still have a long way to go to halt the rise, as each year more CO2 piles up in the atmosphere. We ultimately need cuts that are much larger and sustained longer than the COVID-related shutdowns of 2020."
I get the sense that most people concerned about this trend hold out a lot of hope for technology. But cuts as large as Keeling is talking about will take sustained cuts to consumption. In other words, rich countries actually consuming less, despite the economic consequences. It could take the form of rationing. Maybe consumption taxes. Maybe something more unusual. And that's never been on the table in any meaningful way.
The good news is, now it should go down and for the next 11 months it will be lower than this.
The bad news is, though the peak happens every year around now, the peak has increased linearly every year for the last 25 years and there doesn't appear to be any change in that trend.
It terrifies me that we're asphyxiating ourselves and increased CO2 can seriously impair human cognition. At a global, population-level scale this is almost certainly statistically significant and it scares me that we could quite literally stupefy ourselves to the point of no return. We need to find solutions now before we're unable to stop ourselves from drowning in our own atmosphere.
I have a CO2 monitor in my home office. 800-1100 ppm are pretty normal readings. If I open a window, I can get it down to ~400 ppm, but I don't notice any difference between the two.
I've heard that ~4000 ppm is noticeable and can impair, but it's impossible to get the level that high, even in a closed room with no ventilation.
I was hoping for change when the world stopped during lockdowns last year. Like pulling your hand out of warm water after slowly acclimating to it previously then re-entering your hand in the water - the smog/pollution coming back with reopening could result in people experiencing an en-masse revolt to pollution and the things causing it. Or maybe it's too soon to see this effect - since viable alternatives are just coming along?
At least it cannot be that bad, can it, when we go to bed each night just worrying how we are going to sell meaningless products before meaningless deadlines to customers who do not even need them instead of putting our efforts into fixing our effing planet so our descendants will have a nice place to live in. Good night for now.
I'm with you... I repeatedly tell collegues of mine that I'm baffled society has decided (by their wallets) that my time is worth more than say, a climate scientist, nuclear or renewable energy engineer, or someone else engaged in planet saving technologies.
[Context]: I mostly reverse engineer malware and embedded systems. Most of what I do is malware for phones... and most of this malware is packaged as stupid games that nobody should be playing anyways. But hey... I get paid well. Good night for now.
Are you starting a company to solve a meaningful climate-related problem? Or are you pining for a giant centralized hand to just dictate solutions? Like what is your actual delta or solution?
Given that 2020 lockdowns was about as massive behavior shift we could hope for in the West, yet seemingly had no impact[0], what's the alternative to these schemes? Is the rise mostly now Chinese manufacturing?
The lockdowns were targeted to reduce person to person contacts; not to reduce emmisions.
A simmilar amount of hardship targeted at reducing emmisions would be far more effective at reducing emmisions (and less effective at reducing the spread of viral respiratory diseases)
The rise - and continuous rise, even though anthropogenic CO₂-emissions went down substantially during the lockdowns in 2020 - is largely dependent on the oceans warming up and outgassing CO₂ [1]. Historical records from ice cores show that CO₂ concentration lags after temperature changes - the concentration goes up after the temperature has gone up, and goes down once the temperature has gone down [2, see fig. 3 (p.431) for the relation between CO₂ concentration and temperature]. As long as the temperature continues to go up, the CO₂ concentration will go up. Once the temperature has stopped rising the CO₂ concentration will stop rising with a lag of a few thousand years [2, p.433, The CO2 decrease lags the temperature decrease by several kyr and may be either steep (as at the end of interglacials 5.5 and 7.5) or more regular (at the end of interglacials 9.3 and 11.3)].
[2] Petit, J. R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D., Barkov, N. I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., … Stievenard, M. (1999). Nature, 399(6735), 429–436. doi:10.1038/20859 (https://doi.org/10.1038/20859)
[+] [-] gdubs|4 years ago|reply
I'd love to be wrong on this one. But the sky turned orange for a week last year, as wildfires tragically demolished entire communities just 35 minutes by car from where I sit. EPA didn't know how to classify the air quality. There were so many fires up and down the West Coast last year they started simply numbering them, or labeling them as whole collections. Here in the PNW we've had a shockingly hot and dry spring, with ominous implications for this summer.
I'll leave you with this: check out 'The Carbon Farming Solution'. It's an incredibly well-researched book. It's in my wheelhouse, but I think it would appeal to a lot of you here (and yes, I've mentioned it a bunch of times before.) It goes both wide and deep on many aspects of land-use change, and is sober and realistic in what we can hope to achieve through better land-stewardship, and rethinking our food system.
1: http://carbonfarmingsolution.com
2: Please don't waste time arguing with me about how 'there have always been wildfires'. What we're facing now is incomparable to the annual burns that used to happen here hundreds of years ago – though prescribed burns to reduce fuel load are certainly something we should be trying to do.
[+] [-] throwaway888abc|4 years ago|reply
1,000-2,000ppm Complaints of drowsiness and poor air.
2,000-5,000 ppm Headaches, sleepiness and stagnant, stale, stuffy air. Poor concentration, loss of attention, increased heart rate and slight nausea may also be present.
5,000 Workplace exposure limit (as 8-hour TWA) in most jurisdictions.
>40,000 ppm Exposure may lead to serious oxygen deprivation resulting in permanent brain damage, coma, even death.
https://www.kane.co.uk/knowledge-centre/what-are-safe-levels...
[+] [-] CraigJPerry|4 years ago|reply
So we’d expect this site to be nearer 250 given its ideal location away from humans and industry?
[+] [-] ijidak|4 years ago|reply
The growth curve so far has not been linear...
Very interesting.
[+] [-] zionic|4 years ago|reply
Hopefully we can stop it around 600 or so.
[+] [-] fomine3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amptorn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|4 years ago|reply
Time series plot (just need to click the Submit button to the left) https://gml.noaa.gov/dv/iadv/graph.php?code=MLO&program=ccgg...
[+] [-] brink|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbelder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sireat|4 years ago|reply
You almost want to believe it fake, but you see how many data points are there and for how long the measurements have been taken.
The trend is so strong - I wonder what would Michael Crichton (ugh) say about it.
[+] [-] knodi123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benhurmarcel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ph_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] textech|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koheripbal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plutonorm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brink|4 years ago|reply
That's extreme.
[+] [-] jjulius|4 years ago|reply
It is what it is; mother nature doesn't give a fuck about us and never will. Preventing climate change would be incredibly painful, as is letting it happen.
[+] [-] elihu|4 years ago|reply
My usual (U.S. centric) suggestions when this topic comes up are to greatly expand solar and wind energy production, finance transcontinental high-voltage DC lines so that we can trade power with Africa/Asia/Europe and even out the day/night imbalance (we can keep fossil fuel plants around as an emergency backup and just not use them), electrify the interstate freeway system so that EVs can charge without stopping and make cross-country road trips without having to haul around huge batteries, and we should expand EV tax credits to cover conversions of existing vehicles as well as new vehicles.
We also need more battery production, especially of technologies like lithium iron phosphate (or whatever replaces it in the future) which are good enough and aren't bottlenecked on expensive materials like cobalt and nickel.
None of these things require people to change their behavior, though it would help if they did. It's probably also not enough to save us from pretty severe climate problems in the future, but at this point I think that's more-or-less unavoidable so we should just do the best we can right now.
[+] [-] fallingfrog|4 years ago|reply
It’s definitely not the kind of thing where I would engage in hand wringing over human stupidity. It sucks and it’s unfair, but it’s the situation we have to deal with.
[+] [-] graeme|4 years ago|reply
2020 we simply began getting worse at a slower rate. But ANY emissions of fossil fuels come from outside the carbon cycle and make the carbon worse.
[+] [-] magneticnorth|4 years ago|reply
However, I am terrified of some recent science indicating that carbon levels ~1200 ppm may prevent marine stratus clouds from forming, which would result in an additional 8 degrees C of warming very quickly (on top of the ~4 degrees we already expect at that level of carbon). [0]
In fact, there is evidence in the geological record that this terrifying increase in warming at not-that-high levels of carbon concentration is real, and has happened before. More terrifying, the estimated carbon ppm at that time was only 600.[1]
I don't know what the error bars are on the caltech climate study; 1200 seems like maybe I won't be around for it but 600 I definitely will be.
[0] https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/high-cosub2sub-levels-can... [1]https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/extreme...
[+] [-] pxi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aazaa|4 years ago|reply
I get the sense that most people concerned about this trend hold out a lot of hope for technology. But cuts as large as Keeling is talking about will take sustained cuts to consumption. In other words, rich countries actually consuming less, despite the economic consequences. It could take the form of rationing. Maybe consumption taxes. Maybe something more unusual. And that's never been on the table in any meaningful way.
[+] [-] yosito|4 years ago|reply
The bad news is, though the peak happens every year around now, the peak has increased linearly every year for the last 25 years and there doesn't appear to be any change in that trend.
[+] [-] tito|4 years ago|reply
We're hosting the AirMiners Launchpad to help early startup teams and solo-founders get off the ground: http://launchpad.airminers.org
If you've already got a founding team and idea, YCombinator has an RFS for carbon removal startups: http://carbon.ycombinator.com
[+] [-] lutorm|4 years ago|reply
Not to detract from the seriousness of the increasing CO2 level, but doesn't _every_ year set a new record for CO2 level?
[+] [-] top_post|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithwhor|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
[+] [-] koheripbal|4 years ago|reply
I've heard that ~4000 ppm is noticeable and can impair, but it's impossible to get the level that high, even in a closed room with no ventilation.
[+] [-] briefcomment|4 years ago|reply
[0] http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/genes-carbon-dioxide-ad...
[+] [-] ianai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwdv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bioinformatics|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drran|4 years ago|reply
1. Use sustainable materials for construction (8% CO2).
2. Use thick layer of sustainable insulation and climate battery to reduce need for heating and cooling to 0 (10% CO2).
3. Use cheap suspended light rail system connected to every house to reduce commuting time, road kills, and CO2 emissions (12% CO2).
4. Generate energy and protect coastal line by massive wave electricity generator.
And so on.
[+] [-] Udik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffggvv|4 years ago|reply
i know that might trigger some people but maybe it’s more realistic.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ioquatix|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adammunich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Microft|4 years ago|reply
At least it cannot be that bad, can it, when we go to bed each night just worrying how we are going to sell meaningless products before meaningless deadlines to customers who do not even need them instead of putting our efforts into fixing our effing planet so our descendants will have a nice place to live in. Good night for now.
[+] [-] hunter-gatherer|4 years ago|reply
[Context]: I mostly reverse engineer malware and embedded systems. Most of what I do is malware for phones... and most of this malware is packaged as stupid games that nobody should be playing anyways. But hey... I get paid well. Good night for now.
[+] [-] function_seven|4 years ago|reply
Not sure if that changes your vote, but FYI :)
[+] [-] wait_a_minute|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gedy|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://research.noaa.gov/Portals/0/easygalleryimages/1/864/...
[+] [-] gizmo686|4 years ago|reply
A simmilar amount of hardship targeted at reducing emmisions would be far more effective at reducing emmisions (and less effective at reducing the spread of viral respiratory diseases)
[+] [-] the_third_wave|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20413-warmer-oceans-r...
[2] Petit, J. R., Jouzel, J., Raynaud, D., Barkov, N. I., Barnola, J.-M., Basile, I., … Stievenard, M. (1999). Nature, 399(6735), 429–436. doi:10.1038/20859 (https://doi.org/10.1038/20859)
[+] [-] wait_a_minute|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lrem|4 years ago|reply