8 ms·

Abstract: > "As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide continue to escalate and drive climate change, the issue of CO2 toxicity is not recognised as a global ris

by Fej 8y ago

Abstract: > "As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide continue to escalate and drive climate change, the issue of CO2 toxicity is not recognised as a global risk. The toxicity of CO2 for breathing has been well defined for high concentrations but it remains effectively unknown what level will compromise human health when individuals are perpetually exposed for their lifetime. There is evidence from the few studies of long-term low-level exposure that permanent exposure, to CO2 levels predicted by the end of the century, will have significant effects on humans. Other studies of slightly higher CO2 levels may offer clues to effects that may occur when humans experience lifelong exposure. Unhealthy blood CO2 concentrations have been measured from people in common office environments where reduced thinking ability and health symptoms have been observed at levels of CO2 above 600 ppm for relatively short-term exposures. Although humans and animals are able to deal with elevated levels of CO2 in the short-term due to various compensation mechanisms in the body, the persistent effects of these mechanisms may have severe consequences in a perpetual environment of elevated CO2. These include threats to life such as kidney failure, bone atrophy and loss of brain function. Existing research also indicates that as ambient CO2 increases in the near-future, there will be an associated increase in cancers, neurological disorders and other conditions. Research is urgently required to clearly identify the severity and proximity of this risk, associated with the primary human function of breathing, being a potential major aspect of climate change." --- Every day, I grow more and more convinced that we are just utterly screwed. Global warming (I am starting to favor the Stallmanism "global heating") has us fucked left, right, and sideways. And the leaders of the world do little about it. It's already too late to reverse course, hasn't been possible for a while. Even then, mitigation isn't coming, not fast enough. There is not enough political will, and a magic carbon-reducing invention is... unlikely (if unpredictable). From whence cometh hope? (Because I'm almost out of it.)

maxbond 8y ago
I work close to this space (I'm an algae cultivation technician), and this is the peace I have come to with it. Hope it helps. > ...a magic carbon-reducing invention is... unlikely (if unpredictable). The technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere isn't magic; you feed algae and you let them grow. There's work being done on piping flue gas from power plants through algae to scrub the carbon as it leaves. Even without scrubbing the flue gas, the only real problem with releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is when you dig it up from the ground first, and the technology for turning organic waste into natural gas is very mature. It is certainly too late to stop climate change, but it's not too late for us to survive climate change. We know how to make energy and chemicals from fresh biomass instead of ancient biomass transformed into petroleum (such as with pyrolysis), we can even sequester carbon while we do it (as biochar), but we don't necessarily know how to integrate all of the required technologies and some of them aren't ready for prime time (hydrothermal liquefaction and cellulosic ethanol come to mind). But research into things like algae cultivation and thermal processing of biomass has been going on since the 80s and the 40s, respectively, and they're actually fairly mature. The two biggest problems are managing massive amounts of complexity and the lack of political will around actually funding & fielding these solutions. If there were sufficient political will, the first problem would simply be a matter of time and money. Hope springs eternal because humans are not. We will begin in earnest to rework our global economy and to fix our environment when enough of the old guard have died that their viewpoint is no longer relevant. There's an adage which goes, "progress is made one funeral at a time." If they don't die quickly enough, our climate will collapse which should provide them with sufficient encouragement. It's not something to celebrate but it is something to reckon with. In short, our bed is made and we're going to lie in it. But tomorrow is a new day.
- aoner 8y ago
  I have been thinking about these problems for a long time and have some ideas regarding carbon sequestration (biochar), algea and a possible method that is profitable. Can I send you an email with some questions? You would help me out a lot!
- amelius 8y ago
  > lack of political will Why wouldn't emissions trading ([1]) solve this? If there is economic incentive to remove CO2, then why wouldn't it happen? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading
  - pjc50 8y ago
    What's the economic incentive to build, enforce and pay for the emissions trading setup? Realistically if it works it will be at a huge cost to the oil-exporting countries of the world, so they're going to delay it as much as possible.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Cap and trade gives highly valuable resources away for free. It hands them to industries who already heavily pollute and based on current usage patterns and adoption curves might slow down adoption of cleaner energy sources. Worse even talking about it directly slows clean tech as companies are better off waiting to get a larger amount of credits for free.
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  Are those two the biggest problems when it comes specifically to biomass? I hear biomass advocates all over the place saying they're the solution, saying: "we'll run entirely on carbon-neutral corn-derived ethanol and the poo from our vegan diets". Wow, that'd be great, but where are the numbers? Many of these claims go without physics-first principles and real numbers to back them up. For instance, using algae, we'd need an incredibly massive commitment of funds to install scrubbers on all the plants across the world. Even if we did that over the next 30-50 years, which we really can't yet because the tech isn't ready, even if a miracle occurred and we did that, that doesn't solve the existing CO2 heating the planet or the negative feedback loops. IMO, the real problem with biomass is the sheer scale of the energy system, it's far too large of an industrial base already for algae scrubbers to be effective. IMO, we need planet-cooling measures, increasing cloud cover, increasing albedo, somethjing to prevent heating and the vicious feedback loops in the arctic and elsewhere. Then, we also need to deal with the CO2, which will still be around even if we reduce insolation and heating. I don't know if algae or CCS or some other method will be used for that, but I see that as secondary to the "easier" cooling mechanisms.
adrianN 8y ago
The ultra low tech version of carbon scrubbing is planting forests, cutting them down and turning the wood into charcoal. When you bury the charcoal it's stable for at least a few millennia and (in moderate quantities at least) it improves soil quality. You could even make a bit of money selling the energy you get from the wood gas. There is at least one guy on HN who did some math regarding the feasibility of this approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957397
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  It is much too slow and would eat arable land which we already do not have enough of. To make replanting successful you would have to reverse desertification of Africa and then replant perhaps. That is over 100 years timeframe. If you need something now and green, the about only option is algae. That still takes huge capital investment.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    Reverse desertification is very doable, IMHO. From the ocean shores - a combination of passive water trapping engineering, akin to what the British did here: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/ascension-island-terraformed-biology-evolution-conservation/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/ascension-island... edit: as well as active Seawater greenhouses at the shores with humid air pumped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_greenhouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_greenhouse Attacking the sand dunes themselves - pin them down so less sand gets blown around. Solar powered rovers can roam the dunes and sinter (with concentrated light) long reams in a pattern in the dunes. This will slow down dune movement both in the short term - what is held down by the sintered reams of glass, can not blow around - but also in the long run - when new sand inevitably blows over the reams of glass, the reams will remain inside the dune, acting as a structural enforcement - rebar in effect, stabilizing the whole dune. Rinse, repeat. Perhaps the roaming rovers can even etch mini-structures into the sand giving local shadow which can trap moisture.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  You can't get more carbon out of an acre that way than you could by using that acre to produce biofuel and use that to displace fossil fuel production. We don't have enough acres of arable land to sustain our current civilization's energy consumption that way, so I think this wouldn't actually solve the problem. Though replacing mono-culture farmland with forests is nice from a biodiversity and aesthetic standpoint.
jabl 8y ago
> From whence cometh hope? Yes, it's most likely too late to hit the 1.5C, and 2C as well unless our beloved leaders suddenly step up to the plate with, you know, actions; we've had enough of flowery words already thank you very much. But, it's not black and white. Everything we can do, helps make it less bad. From Kate Raworth: - Don't be a pessimist, if it makes you give up. - Don't be an optimist, if it makes you laid back. - Be an activist! The urgency of the climate issue is one of the main reasons I support nuclear power, in addition to renewables. Heck, although I've long seen CCS as a boondoggle, there are some recent promising results there as well which we ought to look seriously into (lookup "Net Power" and their "Allam cycle" tech). We need a crash program to build every zero-carbon source we can!
- oldcynic 8y ago
  > Everything we can do, helps make it less bad Well sometimes. Recycling turns out to be more energy intensive than deposit and reuse. All the moves to efficiency, LED and CCFL lighting, and can be offset by permitting a single additional fracking or shale oil site. Makes it difficult not to logically become a pessimist who gives up when the idiots have orders of magnitude more leverage.
  - jabl 8y ago
    > Well sometimes. Perhaps I should have explicitly written "Everything we can do [to reduce GHG emissions]". Of course there's lots of things we do that makes the situation worse! > Recycling turns out to be more energy intensive than deposit and reuse. Sometimes, sometimes not. Say, smelting recycled steel produces a lot less GHG emissions than producing fresh steel with a blast furnace, particularly if the local electricity grid has low carbon intensity. But yes, there are other considerations in the world than GHG emissions. And in some cases increasing GHG emissions might be worth it (say, lifting 3rd world countries out of energy poverty). I'm just saying that GHG reductions should have a lot higher weight in policymaking than what it has now. > All the moves to efficiency, LED and CCFL lighting, and can be offset by permitting a single additional fracking or shale oil site. Maybe. But, it would be even worse if we hadn't done the efficiency, LED etc. stuff and instead permitted two additional wells! Everything, well if not actually helps, at least makes it less bad. > Makes it difficult not to logically become a pessimist who gives up when the idiots have orders of magnitude more leverage. I agree, it's hard. Have to keep trying!
KnightOfWords 8y ago
I'm a little more optimistic than you. Former sceptics/deniers are waking up and significant mitigation action is taking place, both on a personal and global level. More people are realising they can reduce their carbon footprint significantly without seriously affecting their quality of life. The frustration is that the action we're taking isn't proportional to the scale of the problem. We aren't going to come through this unscathed but we still have some room to maneuver. Here's some better news: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2148684/coming-plate-near-you-soon-rice-grown-chinese-scientists-using http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2148684/comin... I certainly wouldn't assume we can innovate our way out of trouble, but we may be able to solve some of the problems climate change is going to cause us.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  Do you have any evidence of deniers waking up? I haven't yet seen as much, especially at policy maker level, it rather seems to have gotten worse with the Trump election.
  - creaghpatr 8y ago
    There are plenty of pragmatists ready to endorse actionable climate initiatives that don't involve the transfer of wealth and sovereignty of the US to a collective ruling body like the UN. But when we encounter someone who slurs the opposition with the 'denier' label, it's unconvincing that your interests are truly with improving the climate rather than proving a political point.
    - m_mueller 8y ago
      It's one thing to see climate management as a fight between nations or political parties, but it's another to claim that climate is not a problem we should care about at all. The latter stance is IMO prevalent in current USGov - I'd love to be proven wrong though. If this holds then I don't see how the 'denier' label doesn't fit.
c12 8y ago
What I'm getting from this is that in the next century or so people are going to gradually get dumber and dumber as the CO2 increases cause the loss of brain function.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  I would be (I am) more worried about heavy metals such as lead and mercury. This comes from my own experience, I was diagnosed with a "gray area" amount of chronic mercury poisoning, meaning the measured amount was just enough for the doctor to recommend chelation treatment (DMPS, DMSA). Note that chronic poisoning is not well understood and there are no reliable tests for it, the tests only measure what's in the blood, but after long-term chronic exposure the problem is what's stored in various tissues throughout the body and blood levels are quite low. So I was "lucky" in a way that I actually had it in the blood (and hair) in significant amounts. Anyway, the reason why I'm worried is that I found that levels that have a noticeable effect are far, far lower than thought. This is actually consistent with what you can see in the history of research on lead, by now the official medical opinion is that the only safe level is zero. Mercury is far worse - and there once was an LD (lethal dose) study on rats where they measured both but also combined the two, and lethality went through the roof (I think the combination was a thousand times more lethal than either metal alone). Combinations are almost never studied (not surprising given the unstudiable amount of them). By using chelators for years, on and off, while having a pretty constant unexciting and mostly stress-free life I noticed a lot of things, and my conclusion is what I said, noticeable effects occur at levels deemed completely uninteresting by the medical field these days (apart from the general recommendation that "zero is best"). I also had quite a few spectacular proven results, such as a decades-old thyroid nodule simply disappearing (the tissue in that area was very active for a few weeks after DMPS chelation), but I found the brain effects far more spectacular. Unfortunately they are also much harder to convey, or even prove. I make a claim that I cannot prove, that even very low levels far below threshold levels of heavy metals have an effect on the brain at least, from mood to intelligence to stress resistance.
  - kgc 8y ago
    Where do you live?
Brakenshire 8y ago
> From whence cometh hope? (Because I'm almost out of it.) The hope is that the core technologies necessary for rapid decarbonization, wind, solar, batteries, smart grid are all rapidly falling into place, and it seems likely that they will end up cheaper than the current technology, it's just a question of whether that happens over 5 years or 20 years. And also that there are enough decent countries or states putting in enough effort to push those technologies over that hump.
asfasgasg 8y ago
I would not panic over this just yet. It is deeply concerning, but there are some mitigating factors: - Population growth is slowing. - Per capita CO2 emissions are falling. - Good reason to believe this trend will continue. Another issue is the magnitude of the effects postulated in the paper. 600->1000 ppm showed 10-20% decreases in cognitive scores on tests during short term exposure. That's huge, but it's important to remember that it took almost 40 years to go from 350->400 (which is roughly where we are today). Emissions growth has been slowing, and I guess despite the US President's best efforts, will probably start falling some time in the next few years. So it may take even longer to get to 500, 600. http://www.acer-acre.ca/resources/climate-change-in-context/introduction-2/global/scientific-projections/projections-for-carbon-dioxide http://www.acer-acre.ca/resources/climate-change-in-context/... This includes some projections, and the graph looks scary, but make sure to look at the bottom of the page to see what each scenario entails, and try to judge what you think is most likely.
- tgtweak 8y ago
  Even a few percentage points should be enough to cause concern at a global scale.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  Couldn't we measure this against aggregate trends in cognitive scoring across different regions over time?
- antisthenes 8y ago
  Most of the cognitive work is done inside buildings, where concentrations are higher anyway, so looking at atmospheric CO2 is almost irrelevant. You can have a properly ventilated building at 1000 atmospheric CO2, and end up with an indoor concentration of 1200ppm; likewise many buildings today have concentrations of 2000+ppm with atmospheric CO2 hovering around 400. That's not to say it's not going to get worse and much worse. But it will take a few human generations to get to that point.
IanDrake 8y ago
“Global warming ... has us fucked left, right, and sideways.” That is a big claim that requires adequate proof to which none was offered. Besides click bait articles which attempt to suggest everything is caused by GW, there is actually very little evidence to suggest we seen any detrimental effects of GW so far.
nonbel 8y ago
>"Every day, I grow more and more convinced that we are just utterly screwed." Have you ever experienced "doom porn", fomo, etc? I suspect not, because it sounds like that is what you are going through. Once you have that experience under your belt you won't be so ready to believe wild speculations.
commandlinefan 8y ago
> leaders of the world do little about it Well... what would you have them do? Air conditioning is (ironically) the biggest contributor to climate change. Should it be outlawed?
tim333 8y ago
>more and more convinced that we are just utterly screwed Some arguments to chill out: CO2 was 10x higher in the past. Life bloomed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#Past_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at... Renewables are getting cheaper exponentially, fossil fuels are not. The cross over is about now https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/01/13/renewable-energy-cost-effective-fossil-fuels-2020/#74eadd6f4ff2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/01/13/renewa... Climate change and sea level change happen all the time - the sea is 120m higher than 16,000 years ago and no one noticed pretty much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise Anyway we'll probably be immortal cyborgs by the time it kicks off ;)
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  > CO2 was 10x higher in the past. Life bloomed Just not mammalian life, or most of the higher order life we know and love. ;)
antisthenes 8y ago
I would venture to say that the last realistic change of course needed to happen before the vast majority of HN audience were born Life on Earth isn't fucked, but our lifestyles certainly will be.

by Fej 8y ago

maxbond 8y ago

I work close to this space (I'm an algae cultivation technician), and this is the peace I have come to with it. Hope it helps. > ...a magic carbon-reducing invention is... unlikely (if unpredictable). The technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere isn't magic; you feed algae and you let them grow. There's work being done on piping flue gas from power plants through algae to scrub the carbon as it leaves. Even without scrubbing the flue gas, the only real problem with releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is when you dig it up from the ground first, and the technology for turning organic waste into natural gas is very mature. It is certainly too late to stop climate change, but it's not too late for us to survive climate change. We know how to make energy and chemicals from fresh biomass instead of ancient biomass transformed into petroleum (such as with pyrolysis), we can even sequester carbon while we do it (as biochar), but we don't necessarily know how to integrate all of the required technologies and some of them aren't ready for prime time (hydrothermal liquefaction and cellulosic ethanol come to mind). But research into things like algae cultivation and thermal processing of biomass has been going on since the 80s and the 40s, respectively, and they're actually fairly mature. The two biggest problems are managing massive amounts of complexity and the lack of political will around actually funding & fielding these solutions. If there were sufficient political will, the first problem would simply be a matter of time and money. Hope springs eternal because humans are not. We will begin in earnest to rework our global economy and to fix our environment when enough of the old guard have died that their viewpoint is no longer relevant. There's an adage which goes, "progress is made one funeral at a time." If they don't die quickly enough, our climate will collapse which should provide them with sufficient encouragement. It's not something to celebrate but it is something to reckon with. In short, our bed is made and we're going to lie in it. But tomorrow is a new day.

aoner 8y ago
I have been thinking about these problems for a long time and have some ideas regarding carbon sequestration (biochar), algea and a possible method that is profitable. Can I send you an email with some questions? You would help me out a lot!
amelius 8y ago
> lack of political will Why wouldn't emissions trading ([1]) solve this? If there is economic incentive to remove CO2, then why wouldn't it happen? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading
- pjc50 8y ago
  What's the economic incentive to build, enforce and pay for the emissions trading setup? Realistically if it works it will be at a huge cost to the oil-exporting countries of the world, so they're going to delay it as much as possible.
- Retric 8y ago
  Cap and trade gives highly valuable resources away for free. It hands them to industries who already heavily pollute and based on current usage patterns and adoption curves might slow down adoption of cleaner energy sources. Worse even talking about it directly slows clean tech as companies are better off waiting to get a larger amount of credits for free.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Are those two the biggest problems when it comes specifically to biomass? I hear biomass advocates all over the place saying they're the solution, saying: "we'll run entirely on carbon-neutral corn-derived ethanol and the poo from our vegan diets". Wow, that'd be great, but where are the numbers? Many of these claims go without physics-first principles and real numbers to back them up. For instance, using algae, we'd need an incredibly massive commitment of funds to install scrubbers on all the plants across the world. Even if we did that over the next 30-50 years, which we really can't yet because the tech isn't ready, even if a miracle occurred and we did that, that doesn't solve the existing CO2 heating the planet or the negative feedback loops. IMO, the real problem with biomass is the sheer scale of the energy system, it's far too large of an industrial base already for algae scrubbers to be effective. IMO, we need planet-cooling measures, increasing cloud cover, increasing albedo, somethjing to prevent heating and the vicious feedback loops in the arctic and elsewhere. Then, we also need to deal with the CO2, which will still be around even if we reduce insolation and heating. I don't know if algae or CCS or some other method will be used for that, but I see that as secondary to the "easier" cooling mechanisms.

adrianN 8y ago

The ultra low tech version of carbon scrubbing is planting forests, cutting them down and turning the wood into charcoal. When you bury the charcoal it's stable for at least a few millennia and (in moderate quantities at least) it improves soil quality. You could even make a bit of money selling the energy you get from the wood gas. There is at least one guy on HN who did some math regarding the feasibility of this approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957397

AstralStorm 8y ago
It is much too slow and would eat arable land which we already do not have enough of. To make replanting successful you would have to reverse desertification of Africa and then replant perhaps. That is over 100 years timeframe. If you need something now and green, the about only option is algae. That still takes huge capital investment.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Reverse desertification is very doable, IMHO. From the ocean shores - a combination of passive water trapping engineering, akin to what the British did here: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/ascension-island-terraformed-biology-evolution-conservation/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/ascension-island... edit: as well as active Seawater greenhouses at the shores with humid air pumped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_greenhouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater_greenhouse Attacking the sand dunes themselves - pin them down so less sand gets blown around. Solar powered rovers can roam the dunes and sinter (with concentrated light) long reams in a pattern in the dunes. This will slow down dune movement both in the short term - what is held down by the sintered reams of glass, can not blow around - but also in the long run - when new sand inevitably blows over the reams of glass, the reams will remain inside the dune, acting as a structural enforcement - rebar in effect, stabilizing the whole dune. Rinse, repeat. Perhaps the roaming rovers can even etch mini-structures into the sand giving local shadow which can trap moisture.
Symmetry 8y ago
You can't get more carbon out of an acre that way than you could by using that acre to produce biofuel and use that to displace fossil fuel production. We don't have enough acres of arable land to sustain our current civilization's energy consumption that way, so I think this wouldn't actually solve the problem. Though replacing mono-culture farmland with forests is nice from a biodiversity and aesthetic standpoint.

jabl 8y ago

> From whence cometh hope? Yes, it's most likely too late to hit the 1.5C, and 2C as well unless our beloved leaders suddenly step up to the plate with, you know, actions; we've had enough of flowery words already thank you very much. But, it's not black and white. Everything we can do, helps make it less bad. From Kate Raworth: - Don't be a pessimist, if it makes you give up. - Don't be an optimist, if it makes you laid back. - Be an activist! The urgency of the climate issue is one of the main reasons I support nuclear power, in addition to renewables. Heck, although I've long seen CCS as a boondoggle, there are some recent promising results there as well which we ought to look seriously into (lookup "Net Power" and their "Allam cycle" tech). We need a crash program to build every zero-carbon source we can!

oldcynic 8y ago
> Everything we can do, helps make it less bad Well sometimes. Recycling turns out to be more energy intensive than deposit and reuse. All the moves to efficiency, LED and CCFL lighting, and can be offset by permitting a single additional fracking or shale oil site. Makes it difficult not to logically become a pessimist who gives up when the idiots have orders of magnitude more leverage.
- jabl 8y ago
  > Well sometimes. Perhaps I should have explicitly written "Everything we can do [to reduce GHG emissions]". Of course there's lots of things we do that makes the situation worse! > Recycling turns out to be more energy intensive than deposit and reuse. Sometimes, sometimes not. Say, smelting recycled steel produces a lot less GHG emissions than producing fresh steel with a blast furnace, particularly if the local electricity grid has low carbon intensity. But yes, there are other considerations in the world than GHG emissions. And in some cases increasing GHG emissions might be worth it (say, lifting 3rd world countries out of energy poverty). I'm just saying that GHG reductions should have a lot higher weight in policymaking than what it has now. > All the moves to efficiency, LED and CCFL lighting, and can be offset by permitting a single additional fracking or shale oil site. Maybe. But, it would be even worse if we hadn't done the efficiency, LED etc. stuff and instead permitted two additional wells! Everything, well if not actually helps, at least makes it less bad. > Makes it difficult not to logically become a pessimist who gives up when the idiots have orders of magnitude more leverage. I agree, it's hard. Have to keep trying!

KnightOfWords 8y ago

I'm a little more optimistic than you. Former sceptics/deniers are waking up and significant mitigation action is taking place, both on a personal and global level. More people are realising they can reduce their carbon footprint significantly without seriously affecting their quality of life. The frustration is that the action we're taking isn't proportional to the scale of the problem. We aren't going to come through this unscathed but we still have some room to maneuver. Here's some better news: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2148684/coming-plate-near-you-soon-rice-grown-chinese-scientists-using http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2148684/comin... I certainly wouldn't assume we can innovate our way out of trouble, but we may be able to solve some of the problems climate change is going to cause us.

m_mueller 8y ago
Do you have any evidence of deniers waking up? I haven't yet seen as much, especially at policy maker level, it rather seems to have gotten worse with the Trump election.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  There are plenty of pragmatists ready to endorse actionable climate initiatives that don't involve the transfer of wealth and sovereignty of the US to a collective ruling body like the UN. But when we encounter someone who slurs the opposition with the 'denier' label, it's unconvincing that your interests are truly with improving the climate rather than proving a political point.
  - m_mueller 8y ago
    It's one thing to see climate management as a fight between nations or political parties, but it's another to claim that climate is not a problem we should care about at all. The latter stance is IMO prevalent in current USGov - I'd love to be proven wrong though. If this holds then I don't see how the 'denier' label doesn't fit.

c12 8y ago

What I'm getting from this is that in the next century or so people are going to gradually get dumber and dumber as the CO2 increases cause the loss of brain function.

ItsMe000001 8y ago
I would be (I am) more worried about heavy metals such as lead and mercury. This comes from my own experience, I was diagnosed with a "gray area" amount of chronic mercury poisoning, meaning the measured amount was just enough for the doctor to recommend chelation treatment (DMPS, DMSA). Note that chronic poisoning is not well understood and there are no reliable tests for it, the tests only measure what's in the blood, but after long-term chronic exposure the problem is what's stored in various tissues throughout the body and blood levels are quite low. So I was "lucky" in a way that I actually had it in the blood (and hair) in significant amounts. Anyway, the reason why I'm worried is that I found that levels that have a noticeable effect are far, far lower than thought. This is actually consistent with what you can see in the history of research on lead, by now the official medical opinion is that the only safe level is zero. Mercury is far worse - and there once was an LD (lethal dose) study on rats where they measured both but also combined the two, and lethality went through the roof (I think the combination was a thousand times more lethal than either metal alone). Combinations are almost never studied (not surprising given the unstudiable amount of them). By using chelators for years, on and off, while having a pretty constant unexciting and mostly stress-free life I noticed a lot of things, and my conclusion is what I said, noticeable effects occur at levels deemed completely uninteresting by the medical field these days (apart from the general recommendation that "zero is best"). I also had quite a few spectacular proven results, such as a decades-old thyroid nodule simply disappearing (the tissue in that area was very active for a few weeks after DMPS chelation), but I found the brain effects far more spectacular. Unfortunately they are also much harder to convey, or even prove. I make a claim that I cannot prove, that even very low levels far below threshold levels of heavy metals have an effect on the brain at least, from mood to intelligence to stress resistance.
- kgc 8y ago
  Where do you live?

Brakenshire 8y ago

> From whence cometh hope? (Because I'm almost out of it.) The hope is that the core technologies necessary for rapid decarbonization, wind, solar, batteries, smart grid are all rapidly falling into place, and it seems likely that they will end up cheaper than the current technology, it's just a question of whether that happens over 5 years or 20 years. And also that there are enough decent countries or states putting in enough effort to push those technologies over that hump.

asfasgasg 8y ago

I would not panic over this just yet. It is deeply concerning, but there are some mitigating factors: - Population growth is slowing. - Per capita CO2 emissions are falling. - Good reason to believe this trend will continue. Another issue is the magnitude of the effects postulated in the paper. 600->1000 ppm showed 10-20% decreases in cognitive scores on tests during short term exposure. That's huge, but it's important to remember that it took almost 40 years to go from 350->400 (which is roughly where we are today). Emissions growth has been slowing, and I guess despite the US President's best efforts, will probably start falling some time in the next few years. So it may take even longer to get to 500, 600. http://www.acer-acre.ca/resources/climate-change-in-context/introduction-2/global/scientific-projections/projections-for-carbon-dioxide http://www.acer-acre.ca/resources/climate-change-in-context/... This includes some projections, and the graph looks scary, but make sure to look at the bottom of the page to see what each scenario entails, and try to judge what you think is most likely.

tgtweak 8y ago
Even a few percentage points should be enough to cause concern at a global scale.
creaghpatr 8y ago
Couldn't we measure this against aggregate trends in cognitive scoring across different regions over time?
antisthenes 8y ago
Most of the cognitive work is done inside buildings, where concentrations are higher anyway, so looking at atmospheric CO2 is almost irrelevant. You can have a properly ventilated building at 1000 atmospheric CO2, and end up with an indoor concentration of 1200ppm; likewise many buildings today have concentrations of 2000+ppm with atmospheric CO2 hovering around 400. That's not to say it's not going to get worse and much worse. But it will take a few human generations to get to that point.

IanDrake 8y ago

“Global warming ... has us fucked left, right, and sideways.” That is a big claim that requires adequate proof to which none was offered. Besides click bait articles which attempt to suggest everything is caused by GW, there is actually very little evidence to suggest we seen any detrimental effects of GW so far.

nonbel 8y ago

>"Every day, I grow more and more convinced that we are just utterly screwed." Have you ever experienced "doom porn", fomo, etc? I suspect not, because it sounds like that is what you are going through. Once you have that experience under your belt you won't be so ready to believe wild speculations.

commandlinefan 8y ago

> leaders of the world do little about it Well... what would you have them do? Air conditioning is (ironically) the biggest contributor to climate change. Should it be outlawed?

tim333 8y ago

>more and more convinced that we are just utterly screwed Some arguments to chill out: CO2 was 10x higher in the past. Life bloomed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere#Past_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at... Renewables are getting cheaper exponentially, fossil fuels are not. The cross over is about now https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/01/13/renewable-energy-cost-effective-fossil-fuels-2020/#74eadd6f4ff2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/01/13/renewa... Climate change and sea level change happen all the time - the sea is 120m higher than 16,000 years ago and no one noticed pretty much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise Anyway we'll probably be immortal cyborgs by the time it kicks off ;)

WorldMaker 8y ago
> CO2 was 10x higher in the past. Life bloomed Just not mammalian life, or most of the higher order life we know and love. ;)

antisthenes 8y ago

I would venture to say that the last realistic change of course needed to happen before the vast majority of HN audience were born Life on Earth isn't fucked, but our lifestyles certainly will be.