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This is a plug for my non-profit building an open-source version of exactly that: ribbitnetwork.org. Our society deserves to have a publicly available map of o

This is a plug for my non-profit building an open-source version of exactly that: ribbitnetwork.org. Our society deserves to have a publicly available map of outdoor emissions. There are lots of hard science and data analysis questions to solve in order to get there with reliable and cheap sensors, but I think it’s a journey worth going on. We’re on discord and GitHub if anyone wants to come build with us.

crazygringo 4y ago
Thank you! That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I've been utterly baffled by how atmospheric CO2 is one of the very top issues of our time, and yet... I can get live temperature, humidity, and things like PM2.5, PM10, NO2, O3, etc... but not CO2. Since you're in this area, do you have any insight as to why? There are thousands of official air quality monitors used all over the world for calculating AQI and similar. Why did they skip CO2? Is there something inherently difficult or inaccurate about measuring it, is its short-term variation simply seen as irrelevant to health and not worth studying, or is there a political fear that live monitoring might somehow become ammunition for climate change deniers, along the lines of every winter blizzard leading to some people taunting "where's your global warming now?" The US government measures CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii... and seemingly nowhere else?
- keenanj 4y ago
  Thanks! Yeah you can build a CO2 outdoor sensor with our instructions on GitHub and hopefully soon you will be able to just purchase a kit if you’d like. As for your question about why does this not exist, there isn’t exactly one reason, but all of the reasons you stated above are certainly a part of the story. The US government has not deployed a network like this primarily due to cost. Monitoring stations that the EPA install typically have a cost of at minimum $100k to install and finding people to maintain it is even harder. Citizen science networks are generally started and deployed by for-profit companies. Because it’s hard to draw a direct line between a high CO2 measurement and some sort of immediate effect, most for-profit companies can’t justify the cost to build and sell something like this. For instance, purple—air is a for profit based on pollution particles. Consumers latch onto this because it has direct health effects and benefits you as the purchaser to know if you should open the windows or not today. Same with weather monitoring stations. There is a direct benefit for you in planning your day to know what the hyper local temperature outside is. It’s a real shame and a place where capitalism fails society in my opinion. Having more data on the issue is important to inform gov. policy, hold emission sources accountable etc.
  - keenanj 4y ago
    I also don’t want to trivialize the difficulty in the data analysis for the very low cost co2 sensors. The accuracy and precision of non-calibrated cheap ( <$100 ) is very poor. It’s still a bit of an unsolved problem to figure out how to best use this data. The theory is that a dense network of low cost and a few high grade sensors can be used to produce meaningful datasets. However it’s still risky and lots of research and testing is needed to validate this. The amount of money required is a bit outside the scope of what most academic labs can support on their own. And it’s way too risky to raise investments as a for-profit. However I do think it’s worth doing, hence why the org. is a non-profit.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      Thank you for all the insight! And thank you for starting the non-profit as well.
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  I don't think local outdoor CO2 levels vary by much. Sure, if you are near a significant source (a highway or a factory burning things), then you'll have some locally elevated levels. Even then, however, the locally elevated levels are unlikely to have a significant effect on health, since it is very easily diffused. Another side of this issue is that CO2 is relatively difficult to measure reliably, because it is a very unreactive molecule. It is not susceptible to oxidation or most other reactions that can be used to determine its presence. Most reliable sensors use an IR light source and measure its attenuation by CO2.

crazygringo 4y ago

Thank you! That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. I've been utterly baffled by how atmospheric CO2 is one of the very top issues of our time, and yet... I can get live temperature, humidity, and things like PM2.5, PM10, NO2, O3, etc... but not CO2. Since you're in this area, do you have any insight as to why? There are thousands of official air quality monitors used all over the world for calculating AQI and similar. Why did they skip CO2? Is there something inherently difficult or inaccurate about measuring it, is its short-term variation simply seen as irrelevant to health and not worth studying, or is there a political fear that live monitoring might somehow become ammunition for climate change deniers, along the lines of every winter blizzard leading to some people taunting "where's your global warming now?" The US government measures CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii... and seemingly nowhere else?

keenanj 4y ago
Thanks! Yeah you can build a CO2 outdoor sensor with our instructions on GitHub and hopefully soon you will be able to just purchase a kit if you’d like. As for your question about why does this not exist, there isn’t exactly one reason, but all of the reasons you stated above are certainly a part of the story. The US government has not deployed a network like this primarily due to cost. Monitoring stations that the EPA install typically have a cost of at minimum $100k to install and finding people to maintain it is even harder. Citizen science networks are generally started and deployed by for-profit companies. Because it’s hard to draw a direct line between a high CO2 measurement and some sort of immediate effect, most for-profit companies can’t justify the cost to build and sell something like this. For instance, purple—air is a for profit based on pollution particles. Consumers latch onto this because it has direct health effects and benefits you as the purchaser to know if you should open the windows or not today. Same with weather monitoring stations. There is a direct benefit for you in planning your day to know what the hyper local temperature outside is. It’s a real shame and a place where capitalism fails society in my opinion. Having more data on the issue is important to inform gov. policy, hold emission sources accountable etc.
- keenanj 4y ago
  I also don’t want to trivialize the difficulty in the data analysis for the very low cost co2 sensors. The accuracy and precision of non-calibrated cheap ( <$100 ) is very poor. It’s still a bit of an unsolved problem to figure out how to best use this data. The theory is that a dense network of low cost and a few high grade sensors can be used to produce meaningful datasets. However it’s still risky and lots of research and testing is needed to validate this. The amount of money required is a bit outside the scope of what most academic labs can support on their own. And it’s way too risky to raise investments as a for-profit. However I do think it’s worth doing, hence why the org. is a non-profit.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    Thank you for all the insight! And thank you for starting the non-profit as well.
alwayslikethis 4y ago
I don't think local outdoor CO2 levels vary by much. Sure, if you are near a significant source (a highway or a factory burning things), then you'll have some locally elevated levels. Even then, however, the locally elevated levels are unlikely to have a significant effect on health, since it is very easily diffused. Another side of this issue is that CO2 is relatively difficult to measure reliably, because it is a very unreactive molecule. It is not susceptible to oxidation or most other reactions that can be used to determine its presence. Most reliable sensors use an IR light source and measure its attenuation by CO2.