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Atmospheric carbon dioxide passes 400ppm

273 points by weatherlight 10y ago

spacehome 10y ago
Missing from the article is any explanation of why 400 ppm is more significant than 350 or 500 or 600. Is this something educated people are already supposed to know?
- creshal 10y ago
  My first idea was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change , but that cites a 550 ppm threshold.
  - loader 10y ago
    Based on the graph in op's article, my napkin math says if we maintain ppm increases we'd reach 550ppm around 2055.
- jonknee 10y ago
  It's a symbolic number because for as long as we've known about CO2's effects on the climate we have been in the 300s.
- labster 10y ago
  It's like the DJIA hitting 10000 or 15000 or whatever. Wooooo we did it people!!! I wish it was something like a CO₂ meter version of the Y2K bug. There are interesting side effects, like how as we burn more fossil fuels, we push the frontier where radiocarbon dating is accurate further into the past. But yeah, you're educated, you should know what the effects of increased CO₂ are.
- tinbad 10y ago
  I think it stems from this 2005 conference that basically concluded that at below 400ppm, it would be unlikely that temperatures would rise by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels and most serious consequences of global warming may be avoided. "Among the conclusions reached, the most significant was a new assessment of the link between the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the increase in global temperature levels. Some researchers have argued that the most serious consequences of global warming might be avoided if global average temperatures rose by no more than 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels (1.4 °C above present levels)" "The conference concluded that, at the level of 550 ppm, it was likely that 2 °C would be exceeded, according to the projections of more recent climate models. Stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 ppm would only result in a 50% likelihood of limiting global warming to 2 °C, and that it would be necessary to achieve stabilisation below 400 ppm to give a relatively high certainty of not exceeding 2 °C."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoiding_Dangerous_Climate_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoiding_Dangerous_Climate_Cha...
- conistonwater 10y ago
  In a way, every point estimate or threshold is "arbitrary" in the sense that it and its consequences are indistinguishable from nearby point estimates/thresholds. So in statistics people usually pick a threshold based on some reasonable risk function and some utility function, and call it a day (but it's important to be clear which functions are being used!). Since there is rarely one right threshold, it is pointless to look for one, but also pointless to complain that the one that was chosen was arbitrary. Unless, of course, it is so far off as to be noticeably less useful in making decisions, and making good decisions is, after all, the whole point of point estimates and thresholds in decision theory.
- maerF0x0 10y ago
  carbon is bad, mmmkay? I like this reference: https://350.org/about/science/ https://350.org/about/science/
- Zardoz84 10y ago
  I'm more worried about that it increased around 4% on only five years
- xapata 10y ago
  People in general are comforted by talking about arbitrary thresholds rather than derivatives, probability distributions, etc. It's unfortunate, but thresholding appears to be an effective way to communicate.
weatherlight 10y ago
This makes me so unbelievably sad.
- rndmind 10y ago
  No do not be sad, fortunately we have a robust, state of the art, highly refined and efficient device for removing cO2 from the atmosphere, they're called trees.
  - Neeek 10y ago
    Too bad they're only good for about 30 years or so before falling over and leaking it all back out again, and nobody is going to be seeing it as good RoI to bury them in the ground unfortunately.
    - rndmind 10y ago
      Right, well I don't know what you mean, leaking it back out. Surely not atmospheric carbon dioxide. At any rate, bamboo also.
      - Neeek 10y ago
        When the tree is decomposed by bacteria and fungus, most of the sequestered carbon is released back in to the atmosphere. Sorry for the vague wording :)
soreal 10y ago
Permanently* *Until we act to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere through various carbon capture methods
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  I don't see anyone doing this currently on a large enough scale, but I'm hopeful that the crashing costs of renewables, which will push the price of electricity down, will be a catalyst for implementing energy-intensive carbon capture and sequestration methods (currently being experimented with in Iceland).
  - phire 10y ago
    It could be a good way of dumping extra load in a renewable national grid. Spec the grid so that in low supply situations (low wind, low sun) there is enough power to cover actual demand 90% of the time. Then whenever there is extra power, (windy and/or sunny days) you redirect that extra power into carbon capture/sequestration.
  - jaggederest 10y ago
    I wish for something like a closed loop cycle: Solar energy into electrolysis to fuel a sabatier process and feed the resulting methane into a syngas-to-gasoline process should be the standard for fuel production in the future. It's energetically expensive, but we'll never run out of water and carbon dioxide.
    - cache-monet 10y ago
      Not exactly a closed loop - about 30-50% of the carbon dioxide we release is absorbed into the ocean[1]. So this process might actually decrease atmospheric CO2 levels, but ocean acidification will continue to increase. [1] http://www.gdrc.org/oceans/fsheet-02.html http://www.gdrc.org/oceans/fsheet-02.html
      - jaggederest 10y ago
bovermyer 10y ago
Just because we're a proto-Arrakis doesn't mean we need to panic. But we should really start investing in spice.
- NotSammyHagar 10y ago
  No, switch to Heinlein. We should be investing in boost, and becoming belters.
Keyframe 10y ago
If only people weren't so scared of nuclear.
- kuschku 10y ago
  If only nuclear companies didn’t cheap out on everything and bribed their way past all regulations and inspections. EDIT: mostly talking here from a German perspective, where several scandals of corruption, bribing inspectors, and drilling holes into the containment vessel under operation have become public in the past years.
  - maerF0x0 10y ago
    if only there was an organization that was given the task and jurisdiction to prosecute criminals.
    - alttab 10y ago
      The FBI? Don't hold your breath...
  - tertius 10y ago
    If only the greenies didn't lobby for insane levels of regulation on nuclear so that we can actually build a plant in less than 30 years.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- rando444 10y ago
  Nuclear at the moment isn't scaleable. We already have more nuclear waste than is currently able to be stored.. and we're talking about stuff that is going to remain deadly for tens of thousands of years. There's nowhere to put the stuff unless we start blasting it out into outer space or develop ways to use it for more energy.
sndean 10y ago
I haven't researched this enough to know how stupid it is, but, just throwing it out there: Why don't we make giant phytoplankton farms? [1] [1] http://nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-breathe-freely/ http://nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-bre...
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Migrating to emissions-free or at least CO2-neutral power sources is slow and expensive, but it must be done, of course. What I wonder though, is why we can't capture our CO2 output and prevent it reaching the atmosphere in the first place. Is it simply prohibitively expensive or difficult?
- Fej 10y ago
  There are no market forces which would bring CO2 capturing technologies to the forefront. i.e. it's cheaper just to dump it in the atmosphere. Something like a carbon tax would very quickly make CO2 capture relevant.
- guelo 10y ago
  Because no one is forcing coal power plants to pay for it.
yan 10y ago
I recently started reading "Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air"[1], which is available as a free book, and it's been a wonderful introduction to reasoning about alternative energy. The author also gave a talk a few years ago that is very approachable[2]. [1] https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE
- yessql 10y ago
  It's interesting, but his solar PV assumptions are pretty outdated in the book. He talks about utility scale solar being 10% efficient, where as it is around 17% now. Even at 10% efficiency, he says it's feasible, but too expensive. We are now at 2.42 cents per kWh unsubsidized for utility scale solar, in the best case. He says solar PV is 4x as expensive as conventional electricity production, which is clearly not true anymore. And the trend says PV will be 4x cheaper than coal within a couple of decades.
  - yan 10y ago
    He addresses that in the book as well. His goal is to give rough estimates and a framework to reason about energy sources, not provide conclusions.
  - sid-kap 10y ago
    It would be cool to maintain a fork of the book with updated figures. Is the tex source available anywhere? EDIT: What seems to be the latest version of the source files is hosted at http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  Watching the talk, now at 22 minutes. So far: highly recommended.
Fej 10y ago
We are in deep shit. We can change, or we can die. Continued emissions at our current rate will kill us. We're already teetering at the precipice of feedback loops and may be committed to some. At this point, we need a Manhattan-Project-level effort to end carbon emissions as we know them. Else we just have to hope that colonies on Mars and the Moon will be able to sustain the species while we nuke ourselves over resource wars here on Earth. The problem is worse than most people know. It doesn't help that we have a segment of the population here in the US that is willing to ignore all evidence on the issue.
- bagels 10y ago
  An earth even 10 degrees warmer than now will be much more habitable than the Moon or Mars ever will be.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    Why is that? I imagine a lot of species would have to move too, but basically, if we all move north (or south, depending on where you are relative to the equator)... why doesn't that work?
    - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      Well, for one thing, we're on a sphere. As you go toward the poles, there's less square miles of land per degree of latitude.
    - bagels 10y ago
      The temperature range. The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field. The liquid water.
      - refurb 10y ago
        The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field. Please explain. I always thought it was gravity.
4684499 10y ago
The Newsroom s03e03 climate change interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI
ph0rque 10y ago
Not to sound like a broken record, but for the average American, $15/person/year will plant enough trees to offset all the CO2 released into the atmosphere by that person: http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-change-solution-simplified http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-chang... Why aren't we doing it? Because nobody is forcing us, and very few are doing it voluntarily.
- codyb 10y ago
  Thanks for that, will donate. Here's a link to the charity itself. I'll take a look and make sure it's on the up and up when I'm home then either donate or sign up for recurring donations if possible. https://donate.trees.org/charity/charity?cid=23832 https://donate.trees.org/charity/charity?cid=23832
- mathattack 10y ago
  To extrapolate, then, we can solve this for $15 * 300,000,000 = $4.5 billion for the US? And if we are 25% of the world's carbon production (I'm pulling this out of the air) then we can do this for $18 billion? This is on the order of a 10th of a percent of GDP per year. Can it really be that low?
  - amock 10y ago
    I don't see how this could work. You need a place to plant all of those trees and let them grow and then store them so that they don't decompose and release CO2 back into the atmosphere. That's a lot of land and it seems like if you continually harvest trees without letting them decompose you'll need to fertilize the land to keep the trees growing well.
    - thatcat 10y ago
      You can convert the trees to biochar, then a large percentage won't decompose. You don't need to fertilize trees because they get their nutrients from microbial life[0], which is increased by fertilization with biochar. [0] elane ingham, food web talk - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
chukye 10y ago
What a common people can do to help to fix that?
- milcron 10y ago
  Try to calculate your carbon footprint, then take steps to reduce it where possible. For example, taking fewer airplane flights.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  If everybody murdered someone else, that would help a lot. More would be better. Also helpful: don't have children, don't drive, don't fly, don't eat meat. Plant trees. Erect solar panels.
- SamPhillips 10y ago
  Some ideas for positive action: "What can a technologist do about climate change?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615 (Spoiler: Be engaged, be influential, use your high-leverage superpowers)
rbosinger 10y ago
I like to imagine the Earth fighting back in some crazy Jumanji way. Plants start growing super fast and breaking apart buildings... stretching out into the sky to suck up the carbon.
- PhearTheCeal 10y ago
  Silliness. We're not hurting the earth. We're just making it a bit less hospitable for us. It's bad, but it's not the apocalypse that some will have you believe.
  - hfourm 10y ago
    I just think the idea of reaching a tipping threshold that we aren't fully aware of the consequences, is the main concern.
  - bduerst 10y ago
    Yes, yes, as humans we will be able to adapt, and no, it's not the plot of 2012. For the flora and fauna in the biomes being destroyed, they are facing extinction.
  - rybosome 10y ago
    > It's bad, but it's not the apocalypse that some will have you believe. Maybe. Your statement masks the deeply serious potential consequences. Yes, it's not going to look like fire-and-brimstone hell on earth; volcanoes spewing ash into the darkened, lightning-filled sky, mile-high tidal waves drowning major population centers, the ground splitting open and swallowing cities whole... But what happens if another migrant wave washes over Europe consisting of starving people whose land is inhospitable due to drought-induced crop failure? One large wave from Syria has provoked considerable social unrest and has contributed to the rise of multiple nationalist, far-right parties. How much more instability can that region take before a war occurs? What would a world war in the age of nuclear weapons look like? Or, what if we hit the scientifically-plausible scenario of runaway climate change resulting from multiple positive feedback loops triggering melting of methane ice on the seafloor, and arctic thaw allowing decomposition of large amounts of organic matter? If the average global temperature rises by 6 degrees C, the hottest days will be so hot that they will have the potential to outright kill many staple crops. In addition to the sea-level rise, large areas of land will be uninhabitable due to heat. As with the above scenario, what happens when large groups of people are starving and can no longer survive where they are currently located? How much instability can human civilization tolerate? ...and that's not even the worst case scenario. What if the temperature really takes off and we experience an anoxic event[0], where the oxygen level in the ocean depletes and they begin emitting highly poisonous hydrogen-sulfide gas? Such an event is linked to high temperatures, high oceanic acidity and high levels of atmospheric CO2. This event would kill the majority of life in the ocean, and due to the combination of the hydrogen-sulfide gas' effect on land animals plus the damage it would cause to the ozone layer resulting in increased UV exposure, this would kill the majority of life on land, too. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event
farorm 10y ago
What I don't get is why policy makers doesn't see this as an opportunity for economic growth. Just start taxing emission and invest heavily in green technology and we could be on our way to start a new industrial revolution!
- davesque 10y ago
  Three words: oil industry lobbyists.
  - alttab 10y ago
    Only part of the equation.
  - draggnar 10y ago
    Actually I think it's one word: China. Companies are competing on a global scale.
- artursapek 10y ago
  Lobbying.
- andys627 10y ago
  Policy makers are "put in office" by those that would pay these taxes.
  - josu 10y ago
    While this is true, I think that there is much more to it. FinTech is taking business away from one of the strongest lobbies in the world, the financial sector, and the regulators all around the world seem to be embracing it, even bitcoin.
- izend 10y ago
  It isn't that simple when there isn't a global agreement on taxing emission, look at what is happening in Ontario: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-electricity-plans-1.3780440 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-electricity-pl...
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
Yikes! At least it's good for the plants. I feel optimistic, however. We are on the cusp of really efficient solar panels and excellent batteries that will finally make it practical to power homes and offices from sunlight most of the time. Electric vehicles are ramping up and it's very likely that in 20 years, the average passenger car on the road will be electric, or at least plug-in hybrid with 100 mpg or better. Ultimately, we'll stop burning so much stuff. Will it be too late, or will the relatively sudden dropoff in CO2 production affect the PPM? Should be interesting to watch, for those of us who live long enough.
- hacker42 10y ago
  > At least it's good for the plants. There are plants (for example hop and wheat [1]) that cannot grow well at high CO2 concentrations. [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5980/899.abstract http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5980/899.abstract
  - hfourm 10y ago
    That may be the key. Save the hops.
    - hinkley 10y ago
      SAVE THE BEER
- rsync 10y ago
  "I feel optimistic, however. We are on the cusp of really efficient solar panels and excellent batteries that will finally make it practical to power homes and offices from sunlight most of the time. Electric vehicles are ramping up and it's very likely that in 20 years, the average passenger car on the road will be electric, or at least plug-in hybrid with 100 mpg or better." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Efficiency gains and new technologies will not, in the long run, mitigate the externalities of resource consumption. The driver is population. That's the only lever that could possibly be effective. If you're frustrated and confused as to how the reactionary wing of politics in the US could be so willfully blind to the facts or "the science", understand that deep down they know - this is just a classic race for resources and even more deep down a fight for kin group survival. You might think they're dummies but there is a deep human memory of reproductive calculus at work. They know that at the very end of this line of thinking is a one-child-policy. Or worse.
kapitza 10y ago
Whenever I see this figure reported on a numerically literate site like HN, I always wonder how many readers know whether the thermal forcing due to CO2 is (a) exponential, (b) logarithmic, or (c) linear as a function of the ppm. Upvote if you didn't know the answer and had to Google it? Downvote if everybody knows the answer and it's a stupid question?
- cornchips 10y ago
  (b) logarithmic Good question to pose.
  - SamPhillips 10y ago
    Yes, but is the rate of growth of CO2 concentration sublinear, linear or superlinear?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gizmo686 10y ago
  I had just assumed it was logarithmic due to my high school understanding of the greenhouse effect. To save people googling, it appears that I was right [0], however this is not try for all greenhouse gasses. For instance, methan grows as sqrt(x), and CFCs are linear. Admittedly, the linked expressions are empirical, so only represent an approximation for the range of values that we have observed. There are also dynamic effects (such as increased water vapor, or a runaway release of trapped methane) that are not being moddeled by estimates of thermal forcing. [0] http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html
  - kapitza 10y ago
    The thermal forcing is just the input to the model. What we'd really like to know is the climate sensitivity -- how does a given forcing affect Earth's temperature? All questions about the legitimacy of climate science are questions about whether simulations of the earth's atmosphere ("general circulation models") can be validated or have predictive power, at least with realistic computing resources. However, the big-O question is an interesting reflection on the ratio between how much scientific communication effort goes into influencing the public, versus educating the public. There is also not much funding available for studying positive impacts of global warming. Scientists have known about the Arrhenius effect for over a century, and in pre-WWII texts the treatment is generally "isn't it cool that burning fossil fuels not only gives us power and light, but is good for agriculture and might prevent the next ice age?" The past is a foreign country, and in that country it was generally assumed that warm periods were good for humans and cold ones were bad. (Mostly because ag yields.) They didn't even really think about it -- and nor do we think much about it, either. Plus ca change...
olivierlacan 10y ago
Worth reposting: What can a technologist do about climate change? http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ (2015)
cpeterso 10y ago
In the post-apocalyptic science fiction novel The Death of Grass (and the movie No Blade of Grass), a virus threatens all the world's grass crops. Some governments begin plotting to nuke (their own!) cities to reduce food demand. There is a worrying analogy to global warming, where governments might consider nuclear war to reduce carbon emissions (from other countries). Though at the point global warming is really bad, it would probably be too late to make much difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass
- zbyte64 10y ago
  And as a bonus you would get a Nuclear winter.
brchr 10y ago
I wanted to make more sense of some of these CO2 headlines, so I put together a scraper that generates live D3 charts of the most recent CO2 measurements from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and keeps them up to date. Here’s weekly: https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-concentration-weekly https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-co... Monthly: https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-concentration-monthly https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-co... And yearly (avg): https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-co2-concentration-running-12-month-average https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-co2-co... And the really scary one, similar to the recent XKCD, is the ice core data from the NOAA: https://www.numer.al/noaa_data/figures/antarctic-ice-cores-revised-800kyr-co2-data https://www.numer.al/noaa_data/figures/antarctic-ice-cores-r... (Fun fact, Postgres date fields underflow after 4713 BC, but the data actually goes back another 700,000 years!)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mastazi 10y ago
  OT: All numer.al graphs are empty in my browser (I can see both axes but there is no line inside the graph). Using Firefox with Adblock Plus and HTTPS Everywhere. PS Temporarily disabling the aforementioned plugins did not help.
  - brchr 10y ago
    @mastazi Thanks for the heads up! I was testing in Chrome and Safari and missed that one completely -- apparently they allow for a circle radius ("r") to be defined in a stylesheet, but Firefox doesn’t. It’s cross-compatible now -- cheers!
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - mastazi 10y ago
      Cool! Is numer.al a personal project of yours? Do you have a quick description of the features? By the way it looks good, congrats!
phs318u 10y ago
Australia's short-lived carbon tax reduced emissions. Despite the overblown media claims at the time, it didn't impose a massive cost on consumers, nor hugely impact GDP. https://ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publication/ccep_crawford_anu_edu_au/2014-07/ccep1411.pdf https://ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publica...
- wott 10y ago
  What happened then? Right-wing came back to the affairs?
  - Neeek 10y ago
    Murdoch smear campaigns happened, it's been a shit show ever since Labor voted to switch their party's head. Right wing has formed parliament in the two elections since, even after doing the exact same thing last year voting Abbott out in favour of Turnbull. "Aw, but they're like exactly the same mate, I'm just gonna draw a dick on the house of reps ballot and vote One Nation for the senate instead." Love it here.
  - ClassyJacket 10y ago
    The Liberal party (the conservatives) got in power denying climate change, and one of their major policies was scrapping the carbon tax ("It's costing you money!!"). They also defunded CSIRO. Another policy they successfully passed was a law that makes it illegal to report on abuse, including sexual abuse, of children if that child happens to be a refugee. We also were in the middle of building a taxpayer-owned, nationwide fibre-to-the-home network. It wasn't just a theoretical plan, it was in progress, and 17% of homes already have it. They cancelled that, too, instead opting to spend the same amount of time and more money on DSL, and have actually been installing slower internet in some people's homes than they already had. Most electorates were very happy with these policies. In July this year they were voted in for a second term.
techbio 10y ago
Scare tactics/propaganda. Whether the article is rightly or wrongly indicating something significant, I can't tell. 1. Chart shows carbon dioxide going from light red to dark red. The color scale is wildly different from the measurements (388ppm -> 404ppm -- 4%; assuredly higher, but not their drastically darkening RGB depiction (247,211,211) -> (134,3,8) EDIT: It has been pointed out to me the percentage change is irrelevant. I'm a fairly ignorant outside observer of climate science with an interest in the presentation of this material. I saw http://xkcd.com/1732/ http://xkcd.com/1732/ but many people will assume heuristic from http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/ I don't think fossil fuel is going away until prices are adjusted to the externalities. Thanks for the downvote, made me think a little harder about the importance of--(jeez, it is hard to say "politically correct" with sounding sarcastic). 2. Cherry picked a solitary data source: "At Mauna Loa Observatory, the world’s marquee site for monitoring carbon dioxide" -- Is there only one? Couldn't the article have provided a global average? 3. Animated image (with unhelpful caption) provides a little movie that looks like the northern hemisphere was on fire for the month of March 10 years ago. This is terrible stuff. Not for passing the "symbolic threshold", but for the beautifully crafted subtexts in presentation. HN, I welcome these threads.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  I downvoted you because of (1.). The change in CO2 measurements should not be compared to a "baseline" of 0ppm, because that is not the baseline. It should be compared to the time-average value before, together with what the standard deviation used to be. So, looking at wikipedia, if the range since year 0 used to be ~260—280 (not sure what it was), your figure of 4% would be a wildly misleading way to present the subsequent change to 400. The baseline for CO2 is not zero.
  - techbio 10y ago
    Quickest way to get an answer on the internet, state something wrong on a forum. Baseline CO2 apparently (from other comments) has always been in the 300+ppm range for human history, but I'm not arguing the details. If, for example, 4% of the world's people were to die from Zeka, it would make Ebola look like a sniffle. I'm arguing the article is a too fine example of persuasive writing. I came for the comments, got a lot.
legulere 10y ago
And it's not only climate change but there's also a negative effect on human cognition: https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-directly-affect-human-cognition-new-harvard-study-shows-2748e7378941#.eefaybx2e https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...
asitdhal 10y ago
North America, Europe and China are slowly wiping out everyone and their own future generation.

273 points by weatherlight 10y ago

Missing from the article is any explanation of why 400 ppm is more significant than 350 or 500 or 600. Is this something educated people are already supposed to know?

creshal 10y ago
My first idea was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change , but that cites a 550 ppm threshold.
- loader 10y ago
  Based on the graph in op's article, my napkin math says if we maintain ppm increases we'd reach 550ppm around 2055.
jonknee 10y ago
It's a symbolic number because for as long as we've known about CO2's effects on the climate we have been in the 300s.
labster 10y ago
It's like the DJIA hitting 10000 or 15000 or whatever. Wooooo we did it people!!! I wish it was something like a CO₂ meter version of the Y2K bug. There are interesting side effects, like how as we burn more fossil fuels, we push the frontier where radiocarbon dating is accurate further into the past. But yeah, you're educated, you should know what the effects of increased CO₂ are.
tinbad 10y ago
I think it stems from this 2005 conference that basically concluded that at below 400ppm, it would be unlikely that temperatures would rise by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels and most serious consequences of global warming may be avoided. "Among the conclusions reached, the most significant was a new assessment of the link between the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the increase in global temperature levels. Some researchers have argued that the most serious consequences of global warming might be avoided if global average temperatures rose by no more than 2 °C (3.6 °F) above pre-industrial levels (1.4 °C above present levels)" "The conference concluded that, at the level of 550 ppm, it was likely that 2 °C would be exceeded, according to the projections of more recent climate models. Stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations at 450 ppm would only result in a 50% likelihood of limiting global warming to 2 °C, and that it would be necessary to achieve stabilisation below 400 ppm to give a relatively high certainty of not exceeding 2 °C."[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoiding_Dangerous_Climate_Change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoiding_Dangerous_Climate_Cha...
conistonwater 10y ago
In a way, every point estimate or threshold is "arbitrary" in the sense that it and its consequences are indistinguishable from nearby point estimates/thresholds. So in statistics people usually pick a threshold based on some reasonable risk function and some utility function, and call it a day (but it's important to be clear which functions are being used!). Since there is rarely one right threshold, it is pointless to look for one, but also pointless to complain that the one that was chosen was arbitrary. Unless, of course, it is so far off as to be noticeably less useful in making decisions, and making good decisions is, after all, the whole point of point estimates and thresholds in decision theory.
maerF0x0 10y ago
carbon is bad, mmmkay? I like this reference: https://350.org/about/science/ https://350.org/about/science/
Zardoz84 10y ago
I'm more worried about that it increased around 4% on only five years
xapata 10y ago
People in general are comforted by talking about arbitrary thresholds rather than derivatives, probability distributions, etc. It's unfortunate, but thresholding appears to be an effective way to communicate.

weatherlight 10y ago

This makes me so unbelievably sad.

rndmind 10y ago
No do not be sad, fortunately we have a robust, state of the art, highly refined and efficient device for removing cO2 from the atmosphere, they're called trees.
- Neeek 10y ago
  Too bad they're only good for about 30 years or so before falling over and leaking it all back out again, and nobody is going to be seeing it as good RoI to bury them in the ground unfortunately.
  - rndmind 10y ago
    Right, well I don't know what you mean, leaking it back out. Surely not atmospheric carbon dioxide. At any rate, bamboo also.
    - Neeek 10y ago
      When the tree is decomposed by bacteria and fungus, most of the sequestered carbon is released back in to the atmosphere. Sorry for the vague wording :)

soreal 10y ago

Permanently* *Until we act to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere through various carbon capture methods

toomuchtodo 10y ago
I don't see anyone doing this currently on a large enough scale, but I'm hopeful that the crashing costs of renewables, which will push the price of electricity down, will be a catalyst for implementing energy-intensive carbon capture and sequestration methods (currently being experimented with in Iceland).
- phire 10y ago
  It could be a good way of dumping extra load in a renewable national grid. Spec the grid so that in low supply situations (low wind, low sun) there is enough power to cover actual demand 90% of the time. Then whenever there is extra power, (windy and/or sunny days) you redirect that extra power into carbon capture/sequestration.
- jaggederest 10y ago
  I wish for something like a closed loop cycle: Solar energy into electrolysis to fuel a sabatier process and feed the resulting methane into a syngas-to-gasoline process should be the standard for fuel production in the future. It's energetically expensive, but we'll never run out of water and carbon dioxide.
  - cache-monet 10y ago
    Not exactly a closed loop - about 30-50% of the carbon dioxide we release is absorbed into the ocean[1]. So this process might actually decrease atmospheric CO2 levels, but ocean acidification will continue to increase. [1] http://www.gdrc.org/oceans/fsheet-02.html http://www.gdrc.org/oceans/fsheet-02.html
    - jaggederest 10y ago

bovermyer 10y ago

Just because we're a proto-Arrakis doesn't mean we need to panic. But we should really start investing in spice.

NotSammyHagar 10y ago
No, switch to Heinlein. We should be investing in boost, and becoming belters.

Keyframe 10y ago

If only people weren't so scared of nuclear.

kuschku 10y ago
If only nuclear companies didn’t cheap out on everything and bribed their way past all regulations and inspections. EDIT: mostly talking here from a German perspective, where several scandals of corruption, bribing inspectors, and drilling holes into the containment vessel under operation have become public in the past years.
- maerF0x0 10y ago
  if only there was an organization that was given the task and jurisdiction to prosecute criminals.
  - alttab 10y ago
    The FBI? Don't hold your breath...
- tertius 10y ago
  If only the greenies didn't lobby for insane levels of regulation on nuclear so that we can actually build a plant in less than 30 years.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
rando444 10y ago
Nuclear at the moment isn't scaleable. We already have more nuclear waste than is currently able to be stored.. and we're talking about stuff that is going to remain deadly for tens of thousands of years. There's nowhere to put the stuff unless we start blasting it out into outer space or develop ways to use it for more energy.

sndean 10y ago

I haven't researched this enough to know how stupid it is, but, just throwing it out there: Why don't we make giant phytoplankton farms? [1] [1] http://nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-breathe-freely/ http://nationalgeographic.org/activity/save-the-plankton-bre...

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

Migrating to emissions-free or at least CO2-neutral power sources is slow and expensive, but it must be done, of course. What I wonder though, is why we can't capture our CO2 output and prevent it reaching the atmosphere in the first place. Is it simply prohibitively expensive or difficult?

Fej 10y ago
There are no market forces which would bring CO2 capturing technologies to the forefront. i.e. it's cheaper just to dump it in the atmosphere. Something like a carbon tax would very quickly make CO2 capture relevant.
guelo 10y ago
Because no one is forcing coal power plants to pay for it.

yan 10y ago

I recently started reading "Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air"[1], which is available as a free book, and it's been a wonderful introduction to reasoning about alternative energy. The author also gave a talk a few years ago that is very approachable[2]. [1] https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFosQtEqzSE

yessql 10y ago
It's interesting, but his solar PV assumptions are pretty outdated in the book. He talks about utility scale solar being 10% efficient, where as it is around 17% now. Even at 10% efficiency, he says it's feasible, but too expensive. We are now at 2.42 cents per kWh unsubsidized for utility scale solar, in the best case. He says solar PV is 4x as expensive as conventional electricity production, which is clearly not true anymore. And the trend says PV will be 4x cheaper than coal within a couple of decades.
- yan 10y ago
  He addresses that in the book as well. His goal is to give rough estimates and a framework to reason about energy sources, not provide conclusions.
- sid-kap 10y ago
  It would be cool to maintain a fork of the book with updated figures. Is the tex source available anywhere? EDIT: What seems to be the latest version of the source files is hosted at http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/.
lucb1e 10y ago
Watching the talk, now at 22 minutes. So far: highly recommended.

Fej 10y ago

We are in deep shit. We can change, or we can die. Continued emissions at our current rate will kill us. We're already teetering at the precipice of feedback loops and may be committed to some. At this point, we need a Manhattan-Project-level effort to end carbon emissions as we know them. Else we just have to hope that colonies on Mars and the Moon will be able to sustain the species while we nuke ourselves over resource wars here on Earth. The problem is worse than most people know. It doesn't help that we have a segment of the population here in the US that is willing to ignore all evidence on the issue.

bagels 10y ago
An earth even 10 degrees warmer than now will be much more habitable than the Moon or Mars ever will be.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  Why is that? I imagine a lot of species would have to move too, but basically, if we all move north (or south, depending on where you are relative to the equator)... why doesn't that work?
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    Well, for one thing, we're on a sphere. As you go toward the poles, there's less square miles of land per degree of latitude.
  - bagels 10y ago
    The temperature range. The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field. The liquid water.
    - refurb 10y ago
      The atmosphere held in by the natural magnetic field. Please explain. I always thought it was gravity.

4684499 10y ago

The Newsroom s03e03 climate change interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XM0uZ9mfOUI

ph0rque 10y ago

Not to sound like a broken record, but for the average American, $15/person/year will plant enough trees to offset all the CO2 released into the atmosphere by that person: http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-change-solution-simplified http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-chang... Why aren't we doing it? Because nobody is forcing us, and very few are doing it voluntarily.

codyb 10y ago
Thanks for that, will donate. Here's a link to the charity itself. I'll take a look and make sure it's on the up and up when I'm home then either donate or sign up for recurring donations if possible. https://donate.trees.org/charity/charity?cid=23832 https://donate.trees.org/charity/charity?cid=23832
mathattack 10y ago
To extrapolate, then, we can solve this for $15 * 300,000,000 = $4.5 billion for the US? And if we are 25% of the world's carbon production (I'm pulling this out of the air) then we can do this for $18 billion? This is on the order of a 10th of a percent of GDP per year. Can it really be that low?
- amock 10y ago
  I don't see how this could work. You need a place to plant all of those trees and let them grow and then store them so that they don't decompose and release CO2 back into the atmosphere. That's a lot of land and it seems like if you continually harvest trees without letting them decompose you'll need to fertilize the land to keep the trees growing well.
  - thatcat 10y ago
    You can convert the trees to biochar, then a large percentage won't decompose. You don't need to fertilize trees because they get their nutrients from microbial life[0], which is increased by fertilization with biochar. [0] elane ingham, food web talk - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag

chukye 10y ago

What a common people can do to help to fix that?

milcron 10y ago
Try to calculate your carbon footprint, then take steps to reduce it where possible. For example, taking fewer airplane flights.
honkhonkpants 10y ago
If everybody murdered someone else, that would help a lot. More would be better. Also helpful: don't have children, don't drive, don't fly, don't eat meat. Plant trees. Erect solar panels.
SamPhillips 10y ago
Some ideas for positive action: "What can a technologist do about climate change?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615 (Spoiler: Be engaged, be influential, use your high-leverage superpowers)

rbosinger 10y ago

I like to imagine the Earth fighting back in some crazy Jumanji way. Plants start growing super fast and breaking apart buildings... stretching out into the sky to suck up the carbon.

PhearTheCeal 10y ago
Silliness. We're not hurting the earth. We're just making it a bit less hospitable for us. It's bad, but it's not the apocalypse that some will have you believe.
- hfourm 10y ago
  I just think the idea of reaching a tipping threshold that we aren't fully aware of the consequences, is the main concern.
- bduerst 10y ago
  Yes, yes, as humans we will be able to adapt, and no, it's not the plot of 2012. For the flora and fauna in the biomes being destroyed, they are facing extinction.
- rybosome 10y ago
  > It's bad, but it's not the apocalypse that some will have you believe. Maybe. Your statement masks the deeply serious potential consequences. Yes, it's not going to look like fire-and-brimstone hell on earth; volcanoes spewing ash into the darkened, lightning-filled sky, mile-high tidal waves drowning major population centers, the ground splitting open and swallowing cities whole... But what happens if another migrant wave washes over Europe consisting of starving people whose land is inhospitable due to drought-induced crop failure? One large wave from Syria has provoked considerable social unrest and has contributed to the rise of multiple nationalist, far-right parties. How much more instability can that region take before a war occurs? What would a world war in the age of nuclear weapons look like? Or, what if we hit the scientifically-plausible scenario of runaway climate change resulting from multiple positive feedback loops triggering melting of methane ice on the seafloor, and arctic thaw allowing decomposition of large amounts of organic matter? If the average global temperature rises by 6 degrees C, the hottest days will be so hot that they will have the potential to outright kill many staple crops. In addition to the sea-level rise, large areas of land will be uninhabitable due to heat. As with the above scenario, what happens when large groups of people are starving and can no longer survive where they are currently located? How much instability can human civilization tolerate? ...and that's not even the worst case scenario. What if the temperature really takes off and we experience an anoxic event[0], where the oxygen level in the ocean depletes and they begin emitting highly poisonous hydrogen-sulfide gas? Such an event is linked to high temperatures, high oceanic acidity and high levels of atmospheric CO2. This event would kill the majority of life in the ocean, and due to the combination of the hydrogen-sulfide gas' effect on land animals plus the damage it would cause to the ozone layer resulting in increased UV exposure, this would kill the majority of life on land, too. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event

farorm 10y ago

What I don't get is why policy makers doesn't see this as an opportunity for economic growth. Just start taxing emission and invest heavily in green technology and we could be on our way to start a new industrial revolution!

davesque 10y ago
Three words: oil industry lobbyists.
- alttab 10y ago
  Only part of the equation.
- draggnar 10y ago
  Actually I think it's one word: China. Companies are competing on a global scale.
artursapek 10y ago
Lobbying.
andys627 10y ago
Policy makers are "put in office" by those that would pay these taxes.
- josu 10y ago
  While this is true, I think that there is much more to it. FinTech is taking business away from one of the strongest lobbies in the world, the financial sector, and the regulators all around the world seem to be embracing it, even bitcoin.
izend 10y ago
It isn't that simple when there isn't a global agreement on taxing emission, look at what is happening in Ontario: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-electricity-plans-1.3780440 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-electricity-pl...

blisterpeanuts 10y ago

Yikes! At least it's good for the plants. I feel optimistic, however. We are on the cusp of really efficient solar panels and excellent batteries that will finally make it practical to power homes and offices from sunlight most of the time. Electric vehicles are ramping up and it's very likely that in 20 years, the average passenger car on the road will be electric, or at least plug-in hybrid with 100 mpg or better. Ultimately, we'll stop burning so much stuff. Will it be too late, or will the relatively sudden dropoff in CO2 production affect the PPM? Should be interesting to watch, for those of us who live long enough.

hacker42 10y ago
> At least it's good for the plants. There are plants (for example hop and wheat [1]) that cannot grow well at high CO2 concentrations. [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5980/899.abstract http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5980/899.abstract
- hfourm 10y ago
  That may be the key. Save the hops.
  - hinkley 10y ago
    SAVE THE BEER
rsync 10y ago
"I feel optimistic, however. We are on the cusp of really efficient solar panels and excellent batteries that will finally make it practical to power homes and offices from sunlight most of the time. Electric vehicles are ramping up and it's very likely that in 20 years, the average passenger car on the road will be electric, or at least plug-in hybrid with 100 mpg or better." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Efficiency gains and new technologies will not, in the long run, mitigate the externalities of resource consumption. The driver is population. That's the only lever that could possibly be effective. If you're frustrated and confused as to how the reactionary wing of politics in the US could be so willfully blind to the facts or "the science", understand that deep down they know - this is just a classic race for resources and even more deep down a fight for kin group survival. You might think they're dummies but there is a deep human memory of reproductive calculus at work. They know that at the very end of this line of thinking is a one-child-policy. Or worse.

kapitza 10y ago

Whenever I see this figure reported on a numerically literate site like HN, I always wonder how many readers know whether the thermal forcing due to CO2 is (a) exponential, (b) logarithmic, or (c) linear as a function of the ppm. Upvote if you didn't know the answer and had to Google it? Downvote if everybody knows the answer and it's a stupid question?

cornchips 10y ago
(b) logarithmic Good question to pose.
- SamPhillips 10y ago
  Yes, but is the rate of growth of CO2 concentration sublinear, linear or superlinear?
deleted 10y ago
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gizmo686 10y ago
I had just assumed it was logarithmic due to my high school understanding of the greenhouse effect. To save people googling, it appears that I was right [0], however this is not try for all greenhouse gasses. For instance, methan grows as sqrt(x), and CFCs are linear. Admittedly, the linked expressions are empirical, so only represent an approximation for the range of values that we have observed. There are also dynamic effects (such as increased water vapor, or a runaway release of trapped methane) that are not being moddeled by estimates of thermal forcing. [0] http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/aggi.html
- kapitza 10y ago
  The thermal forcing is just the input to the model. What we'd really like to know is the climate sensitivity -- how does a given forcing affect Earth's temperature? All questions about the legitimacy of climate science are questions about whether simulations of the earth's atmosphere ("general circulation models") can be validated or have predictive power, at least with realistic computing resources. However, the big-O question is an interesting reflection on the ratio between how much scientific communication effort goes into influencing the public, versus educating the public. There is also not much funding available for studying positive impacts of global warming. Scientists have known about the Arrhenius effect for over a century, and in pre-WWII texts the treatment is generally "isn't it cool that burning fossil fuels not only gives us power and light, but is good for agriculture and might prevent the next ice age?" The past is a foreign country, and in that country it was generally assumed that warm periods were good for humans and cold ones were bad. (Mostly because ag yields.) They didn't even really think about it -- and nor do we think much about it, either. Plus ca change...

olivierlacan 10y ago

Worth reposting: What can a technologist do about climate change? http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ (2015)

cpeterso 10y ago

In the post-apocalyptic science fiction novel The Death of Grass (and the movie No Blade of Grass), a virus threatens all the world's grass crops. Some governments begin plotting to nuke (their own!) cities to reduce food demand. There is a worrying analogy to global warming, where governments might consider nuclear war to reduce carbon emissions (from other countries). Though at the point global warming is really bad, it would probably be too late to make much difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Grass

zbyte64 10y ago
And as a bonus you would get a Nuclear winter.

brchr 10y ago

I wanted to make more sense of some of these CO2 headlines, so I put together a scraper that generates live D3 charts of the most recent CO2 measurements from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and keeps them up to date. Here’s weekly: https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-concentration-weekly https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-co... Monthly: https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-concentration-monthly https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-c02-co... And yearly (avg): https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-co2-concentration-running-12-month-average https://www.numer.al/scripps_data/figures/atmospheric-co2-co... And the really scary one, similar to the recent XKCD, is the ice core data from the NOAA: https://www.numer.al/noaa_data/figures/antarctic-ice-cores-revised-800kyr-co2-data https://www.numer.al/noaa_data/figures/antarctic-ice-cores-r... (Fun fact, Postgres date fields underflow after 4713 BC, but the data actually goes back another 700,000 years!)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mastazi 10y ago
OT: All numer.al graphs are empty in my browser (I can see both axes but there is no line inside the graph). Using Firefox with Adblock Plus and HTTPS Everywhere. PS Temporarily disabling the aforementioned plugins did not help.
- brchr 10y ago
  @mastazi Thanks for the heads up! I was testing in Chrome and Safari and missed that one completely -- apparently they allow for a circle radius ("r") to be defined in a stylesheet, but Firefox doesn’t. It’s cross-compatible now -- cheers!
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mastazi 10y ago
    Cool! Is numer.al a personal project of yours? Do you have a quick description of the features? By the way it looks good, congrats!

phs318u 10y ago

Australia's short-lived carbon tax reduced emissions. Despite the overblown media claims at the time, it didn't impose a massive cost on consumers, nor hugely impact GDP. https://ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publication/ccep_crawford_anu_edu_au/2014-07/ccep1411.pdf https://ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/publica...

wott 10y ago
What happened then? Right-wing came back to the affairs?
- Neeek 10y ago
  Murdoch smear campaigns happened, it's been a shit show ever since Labor voted to switch their party's head. Right wing has formed parliament in the two elections since, even after doing the exact same thing last year voting Abbott out in favour of Turnbull. "Aw, but they're like exactly the same mate, I'm just gonna draw a dick on the house of reps ballot and vote One Nation for the senate instead." Love it here.
- ClassyJacket 10y ago
  The Liberal party (the conservatives) got in power denying climate change, and one of their major policies was scrapping the carbon tax ("It's costing you money!!"). They also defunded CSIRO. Another policy they successfully passed was a law that makes it illegal to report on abuse, including sexual abuse, of children if that child happens to be a refugee. We also were in the middle of building a taxpayer-owned, nationwide fibre-to-the-home network. It wasn't just a theoretical plan, it was in progress, and 17% of homes already have it. They cancelled that, too, instead opting to spend the same amount of time and more money on DSL, and have actually been installing slower internet in some people's homes than they already had. Most electorates were very happy with these policies. In July this year they were voted in for a second term.

techbio 10y ago

Scare tactics/propaganda. Whether the article is rightly or wrongly indicating something significant, I can't tell. 1. Chart shows carbon dioxide going from light red to dark red. The color scale is wildly different from the measurements (388ppm -> 404ppm -- 4%; assuredly higher, but not their drastically darkening RGB depiction (247,211,211) -> (134,3,8) EDIT: It has been pointed out to me the percentage change is irrelevant. I'm a fairly ignorant outside observer of climate science with an interest in the presentation of this material. I saw http://xkcd.com/1732/ http://xkcd.com/1732/ but many people will assume heuristic from http://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/ I don't think fossil fuel is going away until prices are adjusted to the externalities. Thanks for the downvote, made me think a little harder about the importance of--(jeez, it is hard to say "politically correct" with sounding sarcastic). 2. Cherry picked a solitary data source: "At Mauna Loa Observatory, the world’s marquee site for monitoring carbon dioxide" -- Is there only one? Couldn't the article have provided a global average? 3. Animated image (with unhelpful caption) provides a little movie that looks like the northern hemisphere was on fire for the month of March 10 years ago. This is terrible stuff. Not for passing the "symbolic threshold", but for the beautifully crafted subtexts in presentation. HN, I welcome these threads.

conistonwater 10y ago
I downvoted you because of (1.). The change in CO2 measurements should not be compared to a "baseline" of 0ppm, because that is not the baseline. It should be compared to the time-average value before, together with what the standard deviation used to be. So, looking at wikipedia, if the range since year 0 used to be ~260—280 (not sure what it was), your figure of 4% would be a wildly misleading way to present the subsequent change to 400. The baseline for CO2 is not zero.
- techbio 10y ago
  Quickest way to get an answer on the internet, state something wrong on a forum. Baseline CO2 apparently (from other comments) has always been in the 300+ppm range for human history, but I'm not arguing the details. If, for example, 4% of the world's people were to die from Zeka, it would make Ebola look like a sniffle. I'm arguing the article is a too fine example of persuasive writing. I came for the comments, got a lot.

legulere 10y ago

And it's not only climate change but there's also a negative effect on human cognition: https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-directly-affect-human-cognition-new-harvard-study-shows-2748e7378941#.eefaybx2e https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...

asitdhal 10y ago

North America, Europe and China are slowly wiping out everyone and their own future generation.