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> he showed [atmospheric CO2] at 315 parts per million in 1958; today it is 421 ppm; in the pre-industrial 19th century, it had rested around 280 ppm) Wow, som

> he showed [atmospheric CO2] at 315 parts per million in 1958; today it is 421 ppm; in the pre-industrial 19th century, it had rested around 280 ppm) Wow, somehow I was unaware that we had raised atmospheric CO2 by 50% -- that's impressive in sense.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
This is why I am completely, totally baffled that anyone tries to still deny the anthropogenic source of climate change. I fully understand that climate models are mind boggingly complex, and that it's incredibly difficult to predict how all the different intertwined factors will play out in real time. But at a very fundamental level, we've drastically increased one of the primary greenhouse gas concentrations at a rate unseen in Earth's history (not to mention many of the other major greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide). Literally no sane person disputes that fact. How could we think that making this major change to Earth's climate system wouldn't have huge effects?
- andrewla 3y ago
  Just to nitpick, while commonly accepted, the idea that CO2 increase is anthropogenic is routinely disputed by climate skeptics [1]. The argument generally is that warming temperatures cause rising CO2. This in turn is a fact not disputed by climate scientists, only that it is not sufficient to explain the current rise in CO2. [1] A pro-AGW debunking of the common argument https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
  - lainga 3y ago
    It's weird to me that there's no mention of silicate weathering in that article as the big negative CO2-temperature feedback. If anything CO2 levels are fighting against a warming/wetting Earth which weathers more rock and captures it... although maybe on a very long timescale
    - sethrin 3y ago
      I think the figure I saw was that if human emissions stopped tomorrow, silicate weathering would get rid of the excess carbon in something on the order of 10k years.
  - jfengel 3y ago
    We are taking carbon out of the ground and turning it into CO2. We know how much and it matches the amount of increase in the atmosphere and oceans. They're not "skeptics". They're not even deniers. They're just liars.
    - ectopasm83 3y ago
      This point doesn't address warming
      - jfengel 3y ago
        It is a high school lab experiment to watch CO2 absorb infrared and heat up. There is no universe in which you can dig vast amounts of carbon, burn it, and not have things warm up. There are lots of hard questions but the fundamental fact that the globe has to warm is an unavoidable conclusion.
        ectopasm83 3y ago
        [flagged]
        shanusmagnus 3y ago
        Where can I go or what can I read written by credible people (not autodidacts and conspiracy theorists from the internet) that makes the case against anthro-caused climate change, and puts the arguments in context with the pro-ACCC people?
        ectopasm83 3y ago
        [dead]
        oceanplexian 3y ago
        Yeah but your high school experiment has no feedback mechanisms, no oceans, water vapor, volcanos, solar cycles, plants, and so on. You’re also not putting in 0.04% CO2 vs 0.0395% CO2 and measuring anything meaningful because the scope and scale of the Earth’s atmosphere is unfathomably larger. If you’ve ever owned a Fish Tank or taken High School Chemistry, you’d realize that even in the most simple environments things don’t always add up in a way that seems intuitive.
  - throw0101c 3y ago
    > The argument generally is that warming temperatures cause rising CO2. This in turn is a fact not disputed by climate scientists, only that it is not sufficient to explain the current rise in CO2. It should also be noted that the type of C in CO2 matters: > In addition, only fossil fuels are consistent with the isotopic fingerprint of the carbon in today’s atmosphere. Different kinds of carbon-containing material have different relative amounts of “light” carbon-12, “heavy” carbon-13, and radioactive carbon-14. Plant matter is enriched in carbon-12, because its lighter weight is more readily used by plants during photosynthesis. Volcanic emissions are enriched in carbon-13. The ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere and the ocean are roughly the same. Since carbon-14 is radioactive, it decays predictably over time. Young organic matter has more carbon-14 than older organic matter, and fossil fuels have no measurable carbon-14 at all. > As carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen over the past century or more, the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 has fallen, which means that the source of the extra carbon dioxide must be enriched in "light" carbon-12. Meanwhile, the relative amount of carbon-14—radioactive carbon—has declined. The record of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is complicated by nuclear bomb testing after 1950, which doubled the amount of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. After the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, the excess atmospheric carbon-14 began to decline as it dispersed into the oceans and the land biosphere. * https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/how-do-we-know-build-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-caused-humans https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/how-do-we-k... > In this “Grand Challenges” paper, we review how the carbon isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2 has changed since the Industrial Revolution due to human activities and their influence on the natural carbon cycle, and we provide new estimates of possible future changes for a range of scenarios. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion and land use change reduce the ratio of 13C/12C in atmospheric CO2 (δ13CO2). This is because 12C is preferentially assimilated during photosynthesis and δ13C in plant-derived carbon in terrestrial ecosystems and fossil fuels is lower than atmospheric δ13CO2. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion also reduce the ratio of 14C/C in atmospheric CO2 (Δ14CO2) because 14C is absent in million-year-old fossil fuels, which have been stored for much longer than the radioactive decay time of 14C. * https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GB006170 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
  - burkaman 3y ago
    That's not the same argument. Some people claim that CO2 increase does not cause temperature increase and therefore temperature increase is not anthropogenic (which is what your link is debunking), but nobody claims that the CO2 increase itself is not anthropogenic.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      I’ve heard people (seemingly educated and intelligent) making arguments like volcanoes emit more (I wasn’t sure when they said it at the time but I looked it up and it’s nowhere near the amount - humans win by an overwhelming amount in CO2 emitted each year even if you look at the biggest eruptions ever).
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        Yes, the usual denial arguments I hear are on the form of "the climate has always been that way", "it's variance on the solar output" and "volcanoes are the ones emitting most of those gases". All are patently bullshit, of course.
        bayesianbot 3y ago
        It's also quite interesting window to thoughts of other people. I find it extremely mind-boggling that we live in times of detecting gravity waves, building particle accelerators etc. and some people live in reality where we don't know how much energy we're getting from the sun or co2 from volcanoes.
        oceanplexian 3y ago
        We can’t predict the weather more than 14 days into the future. It seems like the opposite to me, it’s a no-brainer that predicting what will happen to an immensely complex system, and making all these assumptions about what will occur 50-100 years from now is going to be hotly debated.
        3y ago
  - biotinker 3y ago
    Ya know, I saw this a year ago, and was curious if it actually held up. After all, the amount of CO2 released by humans is only about 4% of all CO2 released, on an annual basis (730 gigatons all sources, ~30 gigatons by humans). But it's a pretty simple equation. We know the approximate mass of the atmosphere, and the number of molecules per weight. We know how many molecules are in a unit mass of CO2. Thus we should be able to calculate out "how many gigatons of CO2 are necessary to increase atmospheric CO2 by 1ppm", and then given measurements of actual CO2 increases, how much CO2 is necessary to increase atmospheric levels by the amounts seen. If the amount of CO2 required to yield the observed increase is greater than annual human emissions, then that's a strong signal that CO2 increase is NOT anthropogenic and something else is going on. If it's less, then that is a strong signal that humans are the primary culprit. Anyway, I did out all the math and it takes about 8.8 gigatons to increase atmospheric levels by 1ppm, and we're netting an increase of about 17gt into the atmosphere per year, for an increase of ~2ppm annually. So it's pretty clear that this is anthropogenic. If anyone wants to check my math I wrote it all up here [0]. Numbers are a couple years old at this point but the conclusion still stands. [0] https://biotinker.dev/posts/climate1.html https://biotinker.dev/posts/climate1.html
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- triyambakam 3y ago
  > we've drastically increased one of the primary greenhouse gas concentrations at a rate unseen in Earth's history I think you need to learn more about Earth's history. Not to dispute the fact that it has increased, but it's totally false to say this is unseen in Earth's history.
  - axelfontaine 3y ago
    You missed the word 'rate'.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      Thank you - that was indeed my primary point. Was a good article yesterday about the "Anthropocene", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014, where if you look at graphs of things like temperature, CO2 concentrations, methane concentrations, etc., that the last hundred or so years just basically show a vertical line.
    - triyambakam 3y ago
      I did not. The Earth has warmed and cooled even more rapidly before.
      - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
        If you have a source or are referring to something specific, please enlighten us.
  - abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    As the sibling comment points out, the rate of increase is important. Dynamical systems are often sensitive to the value of a parameter, its rate of change and/or its rate of rate of change. Eg. You can warm milk to a certain temperature (the parameter) on a stove on gentle heat and it will be fine. If you warm it to the same temperature on high heat (i.e. increased rate of parameter), it will burn. That's because the convection process in this system has limited maximum speed. If you look at when previously the Earth's atmosphere had high CO2, it took hundreds of thousands to many millions of years get there. We did it in a 100 years, so at least a thousand times faster.
- GrumpyNl 3y ago
  We all agree that there is more co2 since 1800. We just cant agree over the effects of it.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    No, "we" can all agree for a reasonable definition of "we." People who argue that warming is not an effect and isn't man-made are being purposely and obstinately wrong, and lying to themselves and often others. And there's actually very few of them, they just shout really loud. There are no alternative facts.
  - seadan83 3y ago
    The effects can be understood through chemistry.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  This is why I am completely, totally baffled that anyone tries to still deny the anthropogenic source of climate change. Ignoring the debate over how much the CO2 impacts the temperature, which other comments address, there are likely a few things at play. First, "BigBusiness" has a vested interest in playing down any risk, so they sink considerable money into campaigning against climate change (political, media, etc). Second, people are conditioned to absorb quick soundbite factoids, not complex models, so "nuh-uh, fake science" hits home better than {complex model}. Plus, change is scary - either doomsday temperature increases OR give up cars and airplanes and cheap hamburgers? Yikes!
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    > change is scary This is all that matters at the end of the day. Most people are not self-aware enough, and/or willing enough to experience their own emotions, to handle ugly truths. It's more emotionally comfortable to find reasons to deny them.
- ectopasm83 3y ago
  >How could we think that making this major change to Earth's climate system wouldn't have huge effects? ppm. Parts per million. 0.0421%
  - ectopasm83 3y ago
    Downvote as much as you want, this is as stupid as GP's point.
  - seadan83 3y ago
    The atmosphere is huge and unevenly distributed. I can't find the exact quote, but to put it in perspective: the weight of the extra C02 added in the last 100 years is more than the sum total of everything humanity has built. The actual quote might be everything from the last 2000 years, regardless, same point. If you weigh all of that CO2, it's an enormous amount.
    - ectopasm83 3y ago
      >Wow. huge quantity. That's still a retarded argument and way below any scientific standard. Now that climate change has become the dominant worldview we witness the bigotisation of this cause, where so called "truth" becomes the target of activism as it as it morphs into a form of belief. Not because what it points to is wrong, but because, as in any politically motivated crusade, any mean, path to reach that truth is deemed worthwhile. This noble cause has turned into a matter of adolescent rebellion that is dealt with absolutism and a way to jump into battle that totally disregards strategic considerations. What if the phenomenon is overblown by the political movement that tries to fight its consequences ? What if the proposed solutions are more painful than the problem ? To hell with these considerations ! You're either with us or against us in our fight against apocalypse itself ! It's not surprising that as the hysteria grows and gains more and more minds, and as the climate skeptics crowd thins out, the figure of the "climate change denier" grows in importance. It's important for communities to have a malevolent figure against which hateful unanimity takes shapes. It allows them to endure the test of time, and survive even when the core beliefs are shaken, should the "deniers" turn into tomorrow's saints. May the crowd turn to them as it even forgets it is changing opinion so as to atone its own sins. Isn't it what this all about ? Recognizing climate urgency as a way to pay for the sins of modern life ? What was the point in abandoning religion if it was to repeat exactly the same structure then ?
- Eric_WVGG 3y ago
  > This is why I am completely, totally baffled that anyone tries to still deny the anthropogenic source of climate change. Few people ever really change their mind about anything; they just get older and die and their opinions get removed from the discourse. I'm mostly referring, of course, to the baby boomers, which is a bit ironic because they're the ones who actually remember that the Jersey River used to freeze every winter (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion). My own father has a degree in geology and had a career in the mining industry… his own take drifted from "this is ridiculous" to "okay it's happening but there have been plenty of similar shifts in the geological record over history." I had to actually show him graphs that illustrated that yes, the earth has shifted temperature by 2º plenty of times in history… over periods of hundreds or thousands of years, not a single century. Now his take has drifted to "there's probably nothing that can be done about it." Anyone pushing for societal change and progress needs to get themselves out of the mindset of "changing minds," it's like swing voters, they're barely real.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    They're the combustion engine generation. In their life most of the roads and highways were built and all cities became fully motorized. Most of them in the western industrialized countries could never imagine or want another way of living because this was the promise and evidence of progress and success since they were born. Unfortunately I wish I shared your optimism that things will change after the boomers pass. I am from and have family in Alberta, oil country, and there's... just no chance. Some of the most vicious deniers (or worse, the "don't carers") are young. I feel like things are swinging back the other way, and quickly. When things start to fall apart people can have two reactions to it... stick and work together to solve the problem, or scatter and hoard and everyman-for-himself and proclaim "I got mine, now get lost..."
moralestapia 3y ago
It gets even worse. Around ~800 ppm you get noticeable cognitive impairment in humans. We may get there by 2100. i.e. in the next generation, unless one's home is equipped with a fancy filtration system, breathing air will have issues on its own, anywhere in the world.
- silverquiet 3y ago
  Cognitive impairment is bad, but probably the least of anyone's concerns at 800 ppm. I suspect the interest will be more in migrating to the last habitable zones near the poles and fighting off the others trying to eke out an existence there. Weird to think that a kid born today could easily live to 2100.
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    >Weird to think that a kid born today could easily live to 2100. Indeed! It's also quite possible that some of the humans that will live forever (or until they choose not to) may already be around us.
    - onion2k 3y ago
      That's possible assuming the pace of medicinal science continues. Someone living until 2100 means they'd be 76. That only requires they don't have an accident. Most people born today will live that long. And, rather sadly, if climate change happens as predicted it is going to make for a pretty bleak existence. It's one reason I'm fairly happy not to have had kids.
      - silverquiet 3y ago
        Yes, I feel fortunate to have never wanted children; it's something that's actually brought me a lot of peace as I've gotten older. It's taken me a long time to come to some acceptance of the likely future of humanity and the Earth, and I can understand why it's so hard for those with children to do so themselves.
meindnoch 3y ago
2 million years ago it was 180ppm.
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  You don't have to go back that far. It's fluctuated back and forth between 160 to 300ppm over the last 800k years. https://science.nasa.gov/resource/graphic-the-relentless-rise-of-carbon-dioxide/ https://science.nasa.gov/resource/graphic-the-relentless-ris...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - cocochanel 3y ago
    Why does it fluctuate to 300ppm ~300k years ago?
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      I don't know, I wasn't there. How old do you think I am?! Just kidding. I suspect that's an interglacial when you have warming and melting but before the trees have grown back to recapture the co2. But check with an expert if you want a more authoritative answer.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        I think is is pretty obvious: those were previous species that tried to become industrial, but were killed by Bigfoots. Humans, with our natural tendency toward absolutely slaughtering other species of large mammals, are the first species to escape the Bigfoot trap.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      It looks a little bit periodic before we showed up. If it is random with some periodic tendency, I guess we don’t need a particular justification for the highest peak, right? One has to be. It isn’t massively higher than the previous peak.
saalweachter 3y ago
We've actually burned nearly enough carbon to double the atmospheric CO2 levels, but other sinks (eg, the acidifying oceans) have taken up enough that only about half stayed in the atmosphere.
barrenko 3y ago
The only thing I needed to find out is that warming of the oceans is measured in HIROSHIMAS per second.
- ectopasm83 3y ago
  [flagged]

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

This is why I am completely, totally baffled that anyone tries to still deny the anthropogenic source of climate change. I fully understand that climate models are mind boggingly complex, and that it's incredibly difficult to predict how all the different intertwined factors will play out in real time. But at a very fundamental level, we've drastically increased one of the primary greenhouse gas concentrations at a rate unseen in Earth's history (not to mention many of the other major greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide). Literally no sane person disputes that fact. How could we think that making this major change to Earth's climate system wouldn't have huge effects?

andrewla 3y ago
Just to nitpick, while commonly accepted, the idea that CO2 increase is anthropogenic is routinely disputed by climate skeptics [1]. The argument generally is that warming temperatures cause rising CO2. This in turn is a fact not disputed by climate scientists, only that it is not sufficient to explain the current rise in CO2. [1] A pro-AGW debunking of the common argument https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm https://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm
- lainga 3y ago
  It's weird to me that there's no mention of silicate weathering in that article as the big negative CO2-temperature feedback. If anything CO2 levels are fighting against a warming/wetting Earth which weathers more rock and captures it... although maybe on a very long timescale
  - sethrin 3y ago
    I think the figure I saw was that if human emissions stopped tomorrow, silicate weathering would get rid of the excess carbon in something on the order of 10k years.
- jfengel 3y ago
  We are taking carbon out of the ground and turning it into CO2. We know how much and it matches the amount of increase in the atmosphere and oceans. They're not "skeptics". They're not even deniers. They're just liars.
  - ectopasm83 3y ago
    This point doesn't address warming
    - jfengel 3y ago
      It is a high school lab experiment to watch CO2 absorb infrared and heat up. There is no universe in which you can dig vast amounts of carbon, burn it, and not have things warm up. There are lots of hard questions but the fundamental fact that the globe has to warm is an unavoidable conclusion.
      - ectopasm83 3y ago
        [flagged]
        shanusmagnus 3y ago
        Where can I go or what can I read written by credible people (not autodidacts and conspiracy theorists from the internet) that makes the case against anthro-caused climate change, and puts the arguments in context with the pro-ACCC people?
        ectopasm83 3y ago
        [dead]
      - oceanplexian 3y ago
        Yeah but your high school experiment has no feedback mechanisms, no oceans, water vapor, volcanos, solar cycles, plants, and so on. You’re also not putting in 0.04% CO2 vs 0.0395% CO2 and measuring anything meaningful because the scope and scale of the Earth’s atmosphere is unfathomably larger. If you’ve ever owned a Fish Tank or taken High School Chemistry, you’d realize that even in the most simple environments things don’t always add up in a way that seems intuitive.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > The argument generally is that warming temperatures cause rising CO2. This in turn is a fact not disputed by climate scientists, only that it is not sufficient to explain the current rise in CO2. It should also be noted that the type of C in CO2 matters: > In addition, only fossil fuels are consistent with the isotopic fingerprint of the carbon in today’s atmosphere. Different kinds of carbon-containing material have different relative amounts of “light” carbon-12, “heavy” carbon-13, and radioactive carbon-14. Plant matter is enriched in carbon-12, because its lighter weight is more readily used by plants during photosynthesis. Volcanic emissions are enriched in carbon-13. The ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere and the ocean are roughly the same. Since carbon-14 is radioactive, it decays predictably over time. Young organic matter has more carbon-14 than older organic matter, and fossil fuels have no measurable carbon-14 at all. > As carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen over the past century or more, the ratio of carbon-13 to carbon-12 has fallen, which means that the source of the extra carbon dioxide must be enriched in "light" carbon-12. Meanwhile, the relative amount of carbon-14—radioactive carbon—has declined. The record of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is complicated by nuclear bomb testing after 1950, which doubled the amount of radioactive carbon in the atmosphere. After the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, the excess atmospheric carbon-14 began to decline as it dispersed into the oceans and the land biosphere. * https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/how-do-we-know-build-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-caused-humans https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/how-do-we-k... > In this “Grand Challenges” paper, we review how the carbon isotopic composition of atmospheric CO2 has changed since the Industrial Revolution due to human activities and their influence on the natural carbon cycle, and we provide new estimates of possible future changes for a range of scenarios. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion and land use change reduce the ratio of 13C/12C in atmospheric CO2 (δ13CO2). This is because 12C is preferentially assimilated during photosynthesis and δ13C in plant-derived carbon in terrestrial ecosystems and fossil fuels is lower than atmospheric δ13CO2. Emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion also reduce the ratio of 14C/C in atmospheric CO2 (Δ14CO2) because 14C is absent in million-year-old fossil fuels, which have been stored for much longer than the radioactive decay time of 14C. * https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GB006170 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
- burkaman 3y ago
  That's not the same argument. Some people claim that CO2 increase does not cause temperature increase and therefore temperature increase is not anthropogenic (which is what your link is debunking), but nobody claims that the CO2 increase itself is not anthropogenic.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    I’ve heard people (seemingly educated and intelligent) making arguments like volcanoes emit more (I wasn’t sure when they said it at the time but I looked it up and it’s nowhere near the amount - humans win by an overwhelming amount in CO2 emitted each year even if you look at the biggest eruptions ever).
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Yes, the usual denial arguments I hear are on the form of "the climate has always been that way", "it's variance on the solar output" and "volcanoes are the ones emitting most of those gases". All are patently bullshit, of course.
      - bayesianbot 3y ago
        It's also quite interesting window to thoughts of other people. I find it extremely mind-boggling that we live in times of detecting gravity waves, building particle accelerators etc. and some people live in reality where we don't know how much energy we're getting from the sun or co2 from volcanoes.
        oceanplexian 3y ago
        We can’t predict the weather more than 14 days into the future. It seems like the opposite to me, it’s a no-brainer that predicting what will happen to an immensely complex system, and making all these assumptions about what will occur 50-100 years from now is going to be hotly debated.
        3y ago
- biotinker 3y ago
  Ya know, I saw this a year ago, and was curious if it actually held up. After all, the amount of CO2 released by humans is only about 4% of all CO2 released, on an annual basis (730 gigatons all sources, ~30 gigatons by humans). But it's a pretty simple equation. We know the approximate mass of the atmosphere, and the number of molecules per weight. We know how many molecules are in a unit mass of CO2. Thus we should be able to calculate out "how many gigatons of CO2 are necessary to increase atmospheric CO2 by 1ppm", and then given measurements of actual CO2 increases, how much CO2 is necessary to increase atmospheric levels by the amounts seen. If the amount of CO2 required to yield the observed increase is greater than annual human emissions, then that's a strong signal that CO2 increase is NOT anthropogenic and something else is going on. If it's less, then that is a strong signal that humans are the primary culprit. Anyway, I did out all the math and it takes about 8.8 gigatons to increase atmospheric levels by 1ppm, and we're netting an increase of about 17gt into the atmosphere per year, for an increase of ~2ppm annually. So it's pretty clear that this is anthropogenic. If anyone wants to check my math I wrote it all up here [0]. Numbers are a couple years old at this point but the conclusion still stands. [0] https://biotinker.dev/posts/climate1.html https://biotinker.dev/posts/climate1.html
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
triyambakam 3y ago
> we've drastically increased one of the primary greenhouse gas concentrations at a rate unseen in Earth's history I think you need to learn more about Earth's history. Not to dispute the fact that it has increased, but it's totally false to say this is unseen in Earth's history.
- axelfontaine 3y ago
  You missed the word 'rate'.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    Thank you - that was indeed my primary point. Was a good article yesterday about the "Anthropocene", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40079014, where if you look at graphs of things like temperature, CO2 concentrations, methane concentrations, etc., that the last hundred or so years just basically show a vertical line.
  - triyambakam 3y ago
    I did not. The Earth has warmed and cooled even more rapidly before.
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      If you have a source or are referring to something specific, please enlighten us.
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  As the sibling comment points out, the rate of increase is important. Dynamical systems are often sensitive to the value of a parameter, its rate of change and/or its rate of rate of change. Eg. You can warm milk to a certain temperature (the parameter) on a stove on gentle heat and it will be fine. If you warm it to the same temperature on high heat (i.e. increased rate of parameter), it will burn. That's because the convection process in this system has limited maximum speed. If you look at when previously the Earth's atmosphere had high CO2, it took hundreds of thousands to many millions of years get there. We did it in a 100 years, so at least a thousand times faster.
GrumpyNl 3y ago
We all agree that there is more co2 since 1800. We just cant agree over the effects of it.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  No, "we" can all agree for a reasonable definition of "we." People who argue that warming is not an effect and isn't man-made are being purposely and obstinately wrong, and lying to themselves and often others. And there's actually very few of them, they just shout really loud. There are no alternative facts.
- seadan83 3y ago
  The effects can be understood through chemistry.
alistairSH 3y ago
This is why I am completely, totally baffled that anyone tries to still deny the anthropogenic source of climate change. Ignoring the debate over how much the CO2 impacts the temperature, which other comments address, there are likely a few things at play. First, "BigBusiness" has a vested interest in playing down any risk, so they sink considerable money into campaigning against climate change (political, media, etc). Second, people are conditioned to absorb quick soundbite factoids, not complex models, so "nuh-uh, fake science" hits home better than {complex model}. Plus, change is scary - either doomsday temperature increases OR give up cars and airplanes and cheap hamburgers? Yikes!
- nerdponx 3y ago
  > change is scary This is all that matters at the end of the day. Most people are not self-aware enough, and/or willing enough to experience their own emotions, to handle ugly truths. It's more emotionally comfortable to find reasons to deny them.
ectopasm83 3y ago
>How could we think that making this major change to Earth's climate system wouldn't have huge effects? ppm. Parts per million. 0.0421%
- ectopasm83 3y ago
  Downvote as much as you want, this is as stupid as GP's point.
- seadan83 3y ago
  The atmosphere is huge and unevenly distributed. I can't find the exact quote, but to put it in perspective: the weight of the extra C02 added in the last 100 years is more than the sum total of everything humanity has built. The actual quote might be everything from the last 2000 years, regardless, same point. If you weigh all of that CO2, it's an enormous amount.
  - ectopasm83 3y ago
    >Wow. huge quantity. That's still a retarded argument and way below any scientific standard. Now that climate change has become the dominant worldview we witness the bigotisation of this cause, where so called "truth" becomes the target of activism as it as it morphs into a form of belief. Not because what it points to is wrong, but because, as in any politically motivated crusade, any mean, path to reach that truth is deemed worthwhile. This noble cause has turned into a matter of adolescent rebellion that is dealt with absolutism and a way to jump into battle that totally disregards strategic considerations. What if the phenomenon is overblown by the political movement that tries to fight its consequences ? What if the proposed solutions are more painful than the problem ? To hell with these considerations ! You're either with us or against us in our fight against apocalypse itself ! It's not surprising that as the hysteria grows and gains more and more minds, and as the climate skeptics crowd thins out, the figure of the "climate change denier" grows in importance. It's important for communities to have a malevolent figure against which hateful unanimity takes shapes. It allows them to endure the test of time, and survive even when the core beliefs are shaken, should the "deniers" turn into tomorrow's saints. May the crowd turn to them as it even forgets it is changing opinion so as to atone its own sins. Isn't it what this all about ? Recognizing climate urgency as a way to pay for the sins of modern life ? What was the point in abandoning religion if it was to repeat exactly the same structure then ?
Eric_WVGG 3y ago
> This is why I am completely, totally baffled that anyone tries to still deny the anthropogenic source of climate change. Few people ever really change their mind about anything; they just get older and die and their opinions get removed from the discourse. I'm mostly referring, of course, to the baby boomers, which is a bit ironic because they're the ones who actually remember that the Jersey River used to freeze every winter (mentioned elsewhere in this discussion). My own father has a degree in geology and had a career in the mining industry… his own take drifted from "this is ridiculous" to "okay it's happening but there have been plenty of similar shifts in the geological record over history." I had to actually show him graphs that illustrated that yes, the earth has shifted temperature by 2º plenty of times in history… over periods of hundreds or thousands of years, not a single century. Now his take has drifted to "there's probably nothing that can be done about it." Anyone pushing for societal change and progress needs to get themselves out of the mindset of "changing minds," it's like swing voters, they're barely real.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  They're the combustion engine generation. In their life most of the roads and highways were built and all cities became fully motorized. Most of them in the western industrialized countries could never imagine or want another way of living because this was the promise and evidence of progress and success since they were born. Unfortunately I wish I shared your optimism that things will change after the boomers pass. I am from and have family in Alberta, oil country, and there's... just no chance. Some of the most vicious deniers (or worse, the "don't carers") are young. I feel like things are swinging back the other way, and quickly. When things start to fall apart people can have two reactions to it... stick and work together to solve the problem, or scatter and hoard and everyman-for-himself and proclaim "I got mine, now get lost..."

moralestapia 3y ago

It gets even worse. Around ~800 ppm you get noticeable cognitive impairment in humans. We may get there by 2100. i.e. in the next generation, unless one's home is equipped with a fancy filtration system, breathing air will have issues on its own, anywhere in the world.

silverquiet 3y ago
Cognitive impairment is bad, but probably the least of anyone's concerns at 800 ppm. I suspect the interest will be more in migrating to the last habitable zones near the poles and fighting off the others trying to eke out an existence there. Weird to think that a kid born today could easily live to 2100.
- moralestapia 3y ago
  >Weird to think that a kid born today could easily live to 2100. Indeed! It's also quite possible that some of the humans that will live forever (or until they choose not to) may already be around us.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    That's possible assuming the pace of medicinal science continues. Someone living until 2100 means they'd be 76. That only requires they don't have an accident. Most people born today will live that long. And, rather sadly, if climate change happens as predicted it is going to make for a pretty bleak existence. It's one reason I'm fairly happy not to have had kids.
    - silverquiet 3y ago
      Yes, I feel fortunate to have never wanted children; it's something that's actually brought me a lot of peace as I've gotten older. It's taken me a long time to come to some acceptance of the likely future of humanity and the Earth, and I can understand why it's so hard for those with children to do so themselves.

meindnoch 3y ago

2 million years ago it was 180ppm.

olddustytrail 3y ago
You don't have to go back that far. It's fluctuated back and forth between 160 to 300ppm over the last 800k years. https://science.nasa.gov/resource/graphic-the-relentless-rise-of-carbon-dioxide/ https://science.nasa.gov/resource/graphic-the-relentless-ris...
- deleted 3y ago
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- cocochanel 3y ago
  Why does it fluctuate to 300ppm ~300k years ago?
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    I don't know, I wasn't there. How old do you think I am?! Just kidding. I suspect that's an interglacial when you have warming and melting but before the trees have grown back to recapture the co2. But check with an expert if you want a more authoritative answer.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      I think is is pretty obvious: those were previous species that tried to become industrial, but were killed by Bigfoots. Humans, with our natural tendency toward absolutely slaughtering other species of large mammals, are the first species to escape the Bigfoot trap.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    It looks a little bit periodic before we showed up. If it is random with some periodic tendency, I guess we don’t need a particular justification for the highest peak, right? One has to be. It isn’t massively higher than the previous peak.

saalweachter 3y ago

We've actually burned nearly enough carbon to double the atmospheric CO2 levels, but other sinks (eg, the acidifying oceans) have taken up enough that only about half stayed in the atmosphere.

barrenko 3y ago

The only thing I needed to find out is that warming of the oceans is measured in HIROSHIMAS per second.

ectopasm83 3y ago
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