Atmospheric CO₂ just topped 430 ppm, highest in 3–5 million years and rising at the fastest rate in tens of millions of years
Posted by wanton_wonton_@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 120 comments
pdx2las@reddit
Looks like it goes up and down about every 100,000 years. That means our species has survived the highs before. Why shouldn't we survive this one?
wanton_wonton_@reddit (OP)
griculture did not exist during any of those periods and humans didn't even exist for more than half of the chart. The current rate of change is orders of magnitude faster than anything in 10s of millions of years. Listen to experts you utter troglodyte.
IKillZombies4Cash@reddit
The fact that this is by far the most CO2 mammals ever breathed in with every breath by a long shot is … interesting
GalliumGames@reddit
Mammals have been around since the age of dinosaurs when CO2 could reach as high as 2,000ppm, but this is certainly the most CO2 anything in the genus Homo has ever been living in.
godlords@reddit
Indeed. And CO2 isn't really difficult to evolve around, the negative effects are almost entirely a result of the body using arterial CO2 concentrations as a metric to signal around. Oxygen is 200,000ppm, 2000ppm of CO2 is no problem, just requires a software update (few thousand years).
Lena-Luthor@reddit
now how do you do that?
grating@reddit
and the thing most people fail to grasp is that for impacts on life it's not the value that counts so much as the rate of change. Evolution makes life incredibly adaptable on a scale of hundreds of thousands of years. On a scale of decades that doesn't help much.
john_paul_@reddit
I have the hypothesis that this is why people are behaving so bizarrely (me included), but then again there so many horrible factors going on at the same time that I guess we'll never know.
adamsoutofideas@reddit
Bingo.
If you think about it, all the other "horrible factors" are imaginary in comparison to the chemistry of the air changing a lot, year over year.
Bombs can go off not even that far away and have no impact on your life but the air... that's everyone and everything, at the same time.
I think it's the only real "zombie apocalypse" scenario, where we all have a subconscious reaction to trying to feel in control and comfortable while the world burns and our instincts tug our lizard brain for us to gtfo.
We're opportunist settlers and most of us are descendants of cave dwellers. There would be a massive advantage to "freaking out" when you're in a "cave" where the conditions are changing toward suffocation; sensing the change and acting on it preserves genetic material and the chance to breed while being blind to that change wipes out competition.
People, obsessed with the illusion that they are not animals and the clothes we wear and cars we drive make us separate from the living world, have created spaces where any "freaking out" is catastrophic. All it takes is a few people realizing they're just humans inside a cigar tube 35k feet in the air, kept there by other humans and a massive amount of fuel being burned...
"Civilization" is a mirage. We act like it's some massive accomplishment but this kind of expanded peaceful tribe grows organically from any source of excess that's sustainable for a few generations. There were civilizations that grew out of mining bird shit because the increase in yield without an increase in work created enough excess for wealth... until the shit runs out or we poison ourselves.
This time we did both.
morphemass@reddit
COVID, forever chemicals, microplastics, information overload ... so many factors that I doubt it's singular in terms of root cause. However you are not wrong in the slightest; we have an environment which is changing faster than any species can evolve and it should be no surprise when the collective unconscious starts to shit itself.
aeschenkarnos@reddit
We shouldn't expect everything else to stay still while only humans change. We are creating an environment in which organisms that consume CO2 will thrive. I'm not saying homestasis will save us. I'm saying homestasis will do something, and the nature of that thing is unpredictable.
Empty-Equipment9273@reddit
Yes I have noticed this aswell as co2 levels get higher they start to have impact on brain although they have to be a lot higher than they are currently but having in at these levels 24/7 definitely will start to take some toll
new2bay@reddit
What evidence do you have that ambient CO2 levels are affecting human cognition?
Rosbj@reddit
At these levels they don't, but your sleep is affected at 3-4x the current values. You have to be in a consistent +5000 ppm enviroment for there to be clear and detrimental effects, with signs that you are affected on a small scale from +1000 ppm over prolonged periods.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232300358X
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360132324005298
Rosbj@reddit
at 600ppm you can measure a small effect, when the outdoors are at 430 it doesn't take much to get way beyond that level indoors, where we spend a lot of time.
blakezilla@reddit
Please source “at 600 ppm you can measure a small effect”. OSHA, NISOH, WHO all say it’s at around 10000ppm/1% that you can notice an increase in arterial CO₂, a shift in blood pH, and other physiological changes, but even at that level they are extraordinarily minor. They say you can work a full 8 hour day at 5000ppm and suffer no ill effects. That has been the upper regulatory limit since 1971.
I say this not to defend the current track we are on, but to limit misinformation and undue fear.
Rosbj@reddit
I read these when they came out in 2024:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232300358X
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360132324005298
And the summary was, that your every-day activities are not affected unless above 5000ppm, but your onset sleep cycle was affected at around 1000ppm and there was a measurable effect on your ability to handle advanced abstract problems starting at 1000ppm, with only a noticable and persistent effect occuring on all measured individuals above 3000ppm.
They did however end up advising that workplaces should not exeed 1000ppm, as there were signs that subjects were struggling with complex problems over longer periods at that level.
The 600ppm was from a youtuber, who I cannot find now, that did a personal study. He stayed inside a greenhouse for 10 days at elevated levels. His subjetive experience, was a decline already at 500ppm and noticed clear and evident confusion at +1000ppm for advanced tasks over the prolonged period.
Pretend-Bend-7975@reddit
We used to have portable CO2 sensors at my workplace. Surpassing 1000ppm indoors is not exceptional. It gets to be the norm around summer.
AnonymousNPC1987@reddit
During COVID, I was a teacher and my admin claimed they upgraded the HVAC and to keep the windows closed to keep the HVAC running efficiently. One day I brought my CO2 monitor in my classroom for the whole day. I shit you not, we had numbers exceeding 2500+ ppm in our classroom. HVAC was clearly a piece of shit. How the fuck can kids or adults concentrate with such high levels? This was in a “nice” public school, too. Imagine schools that are older or have minimally working HVAC systems.
Told my admin and he shrugged. I ended up opening my windows every day the rest of the year. Didn’t care about repercussions.
PatrolMan2129@reddit
>This was in a “nice” public school, too. Imagine schools that are older or have minimally working HVAC systems.
Ironically, they'd have lower OC2 because there'd be more airleaks in the building. Perhaps not as "room temp" 24/7 but lower CO2.
HVAC doesn't create the CO2 that's in the building (otherwise you'd have carbon monoxide leaks as well), they just seal the building up better to keep the CO2 humans breathe within the building.
Really rich private schools and other buildings in the future probably will have some CO2 scrubbers to bring CO2 back to ancestral 280 ppm or something so rich kids can learn right. Just another sales pitch to the rich, but rooted in truth.
Ironically, warm buildings the past didn't rely on stopping all air movement. Cause that would just cause humidity to spike and all manner of mildew problems. It was controlled air movement and other tricks and still keep warm. I think a proper building would exchange it's total inside air something like 6x a day.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVqwiMtoDhk&t=1s
InvisibleTextArea@reddit
I have a log burner in my house. We had to add holes (air bricks etc) to the building in order to make it work correctly and not kill us with carbon monoxide. It probably pulls thousands of litres of air through the building when it is lit.
WildSauce@reddit
Good HVAC systems monitor CO2 and increase outdoor air ventilation levels to maintain low CO2 concentration. Standard for new school builds in California. HVAC quality is about a lot more than being air tight.
PatrolMan2129@reddit
They can do that, but they can still only decrease CO2 to atmospheric levels but not ancestral levels without CO2 scrubbers of some sort. They used that tech in space shuttles, submarines and such.
GridDown55@reddit
You did the right thing. What a nightmare.
4_AOC_DMT@reddit
Good on you for opening the windows, but I have to ask, which wave between 1 and 12 would you was during covid?
croppkiller@reddit
Thank you for pushing back against the pandemic's hypernormalization.
AnonymousNPC1987@reddit
Between 2020-2022. I quit teaching shortly thereafter (taught high school science in a “red” state).
ttystikk@reddit
Teaching science in a Red State qualifies as hardship duty!
The cannabis industry regularly ran 1500 PPM in the grow rooms. 2500 PPM is easily reaching the point where people with breathing problems would be feeling the effects.
As an HVAC tech, I know that many holding air helping systems use CO2 as a parameter for air exchanges. Apparently the owners of your school building skimped on their system and didn't bother to hook up the CO2 monitoring.
TrickyProfit1369@reddit
Cool graph, do you have any data for europe? Couldnt find anything for my home country after 2023.
unknownpoltroon@reddit
Yeah, I have one, it goes up to 6-700 in the winter all the time. It was getting up to 1100 but I started always leaving a coupoe of windows cracked. I got the reader after watching this dude https://youtu.be/1Nh_vxpycEA?si=6lsqBu5HkqOQIcmD
Syonoq@reddit
Well, that was breathtaking.
What monitor did you buy? I’m sold.
ba123blitz@reddit
Ton of them on Amazon. The one on my desk is a clock, on top of measuring temp humidity and CO2 levels with a alarm for crossing 2000ppm
If my door is shut and window shut I’ll hit 2000 ppm within a hour or two of playing games
f0rgotten@reddit
Just wait for blood acidosis from high co2 content. We will all be feeling great before too long.
new2bay@reddit
Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll all be dead before levels reach that high.
f0rgotten@reddit
Yes, I forgot.
Ok-Brick-1800@reddit
Yep
canwealljusthitabong@reddit
Is that a feature on Apple Watch?
Ok-Brick-1800@reddit
No it's a CO2 detector.
wanton_wonton_@reddit (OP)
What to say?
Here's some lyrics from Muse:
BadgerKomodo@reddit
Very well said, OP.
DivaExMachina666@reddit
I'm scared.
BadgerKomodo@reddit
Same
Distinguishedflyer@reddit
smart response.
JohnTo7@reddit
I am sure we will survive. There is still plenty of time before it will really hit us. Instead of agonizing about what is happening we must prepare.
We must get organized and must stop wars where enormous amounts of money is just wasted. These founds could be used to build roads, railways systems, new cities. It is time for peace now.
The coastal areas will be inundated, but in the meantime the deserts will get green with increased rainfall. We can migrate people there. There are countries like Russia or Canada with large areas that due to cold weather are currently uninhabitable, but with climate warming will become livable. Our beautiful Earth is always changing, but our short lives don't allow us to fully appreciate this. Humans survived previous cataclysms without advanced civilization. With our modern technologies like AI we are very well ready for this challenge.
This is not the end of the world, but the beginning of a new world with a lot of new opportunities.
Distinguishedflyer@reddit
this is not the sub for delusion.
JohnTo7@reddit
As far as I am concerned collapse does not necessarily mean the end of everything. It is just an end of one paradigm and start of another.
You can watch it and cry that we are doomed or you can prepare for a change. You choice.
Distinguishedflyer@reddit
At some point you will have to face thermodynamic reality. Living beings have temperature limits. They don't care about your opinion.
Given what this entire post is talking about, that is CO2 limits that far exceed anything humans have ever experienced, that show no sign of slowing, that are rapidly heating the planet, the only "change" coming is mass death.
JohnTo7@reddit
Yes, the levels of CO2 far exceed the human experience, but not Earth's experience. 55 mil years ago the Earth was much warmer and on top of that it experienced even higher warming period called Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum (PETM). It can actually be compared to what is happening now. It was a mass extinction event, but it also switched on the feedback mechanizm that brought that warming right down to the normal (at that time) levels, very quickly. At that time it was very warm, there were no ice caps and water levels were much higher then now. On Greenland there was tropical forest growing. The equatorial regions probably were not livable, there must have been a large, deadly deserts there.
However, CO2 levels caused the explosion of plants, especially aquatic plants, which absorb a lot of carbon dioxide. That and other natural mechanisms eventually brought the levels back to normal and cooled the climate. Of course it took thousands of years, but the Earth recovered.
The same will happen now. We just must make sure that we will survive as well.
As I already mentioned with our technologies we will manage for sure. Initially, due to our disorganization and learned helplessness a lot of people will perish but in the end as a species we will thrive.
BoringRedHorse@reddit
Thanks, boomers...
guyseeking@reddit
Don't worry, humans are too resilient to go extinct....
j_mantuf@reddit
I check it almost daily and could be misremembering but I thought I saw it at 433ppm earlier this week.
Either way, yea we’re fucked.
Ya-Not-Happening@reddit
We are hitting the accelerator while driving towards the cliff
GuerillaBean@reddit
gotta admire the power of the engine though
siboq@reddit
We’re hoping to develop the tech needed to fly across the canyon before we reach the edge and fall to our death.
phaedrus910@reddit
And posturing against the only country able to invent that tech
LastCivStanding@reddit
Just like thelma and louise
Lost_Birthday_3138@reddit
Beat me to it
Lost_Birthday_3138@reddit
Real Thelma and Louise ending
BodaciousBadongadonk@reddit
wuth a clown car packed with morons and we're trapped at the bottom listening to them argue about what radio station to listen
Super-414@reddit
It reduces during the North hemisphere summer when plants uptake CO2 to grow, so very possible you did see it that high.
lolmish@reddit
"Flatten the curve"
volci@reddit
And this matters...why?
The effect of co2 on warming is negligible
And its additional effect drops exponentially as more is added
SpydrBilt@reddit
HAAAA HAAA HAAA HAAAAA DOPES
Frutbrute77@reddit
Well, it ain’t done yet
Distinguishedflyer@reddit
at some point of CO2e, cloud formation goes away.
The_Sex_Pistils@reddit
So, about 50 ppm away from a doubling of pre-industrial?
gnostic_savage@reddit
Only 7 ppm away from doubling the pre-industrial average of 220 ppm. That will be reached by spring of 2028. At an increase of 3 to 4 ppm increase per year, we have a ways to go, about thirty years, before we double the previous normal peak of 280 ppm, but the increase could and likely will increase before then.
Ree_For_Thee@reddit
With other GHGs we're well past 500. With albedo loss, who even knows?
cloudydayscoming@reddit
Does it really feel worse? Not for me. Not for most. Latest data shows fewer deaths from cold. Maybe we should embrace the suck!
Arklese1zure@reddit
Sorry guys, gotta keep that economy chugging along. Those private islands full of kids aren't gonna buy themselves.
WileyCoyote7@reddit
I like that it look like a heartbeat. Systolic (higher levels), Diastolic (lower levels). The Systolic is way higher, much the same way a heartbeat would be if there was an infection.
Care to guess what the infection is?
Lost_Birthday_3138@reddit
I feel we should land a bunch of stuff on the moon warning the next species what not to do. Though I'm not sure what we could have done differently outside of [redacted] all the greedy people.
Bipogram@reddit
Homo sap. V1.0 has firmware that requires expansion and assumes an infinite world.
Thst's one of the problems.
AlwaysPissedOff59@reddit
Who knew that our species' scientific name would turn out to be ironic when Linnaeus coined it? Homo stultus (idiot Man), Homo ambitiosus (selfish Man), Homo oculatus (short-sighted Man), Homo mutumfutuis (dumbfuck Man) would ALL have been more appropriate.
Bipogram@reddit
Homo Faber.
Maker of dreams and nightmares.
Stock_Emu_2588@reddit
Hell yeah! Keep it up guys
SupernovaTheGrey@reddit
Every one of those peaks was a civilisation.
new2bay@reddit
This just confirms that we should have stopped making humans beyond replacement numbers in the 1960s or so.
Bipogram@reddit
And greatly constrained our use of fossil fuels at the same time.
new2bay@reddit
Not making more humans would have helped a lot with that, too.
KaMilAnRavgs@reddit
Yep. Not counting i have many photos of back then. It seemed so spacious. And less people. Now so full
ttystikk@reddit
I just had a look and the latest reading was 431.64 PPM, a half point higher.
My point is that the advertised number is a daily AVERAGE and not the absolute peak number.
Drone314@reddit
If you think that's bad go take a look at in-door CO2 levels, can be 2-3x higher based on ventilation. We're going to choke our brains out ever so slowly we wont see the Idiocrasy coming....
Bipogram@reddit
Hypercarbia and hypercapnia!
fuf3d@reddit
Plants and trees love it!
Let's double it and bring back the dinosaurs 🦕
trickortreat89@reddit
This graph is so bizarre… visually this should be the strongest warning. I don’t get why no one is writing about this huge human fuck up daily
DrTreeMan@reddit
People are, but the algorithms and media don't push this narrative, so its hard to find and those producing the information are often discredited.
Lost_Birthday_3138@reddit
Only The Guardian still is. The worthless billionaire-owned media forgot it's happening.
kingtacticool@reddit
What happened 320,000 years ago to cause that spike
WileyCoyote7@reddit
Changes in the Earth’s orbit that occur naturally, with it being closer or further from the Sun. It switches from ice ages to warmer periods, such as the one than mankind has arosen in. The good news is that, naturally, in about 130,000 years the Earth will tilt back toward a cooling phase, although it’s effects will be muted by what we’ve done.
The bad news is, well, I think you know the bad news.
DrTreeMan@reddit
We actually would be in a cooling phase right now if not for ghg emissions.
Frozty23@reddit
Remind me: 130,000 years.
ThrowRA-4545@reddit
Monkeys burning coal to keep warm probably
Lost_Birthday_3138@reddit
Some Metallica lyrics
Jovan_Knight005@reddit
I listened to a song earlier today before i fell asleep and it has some ominous sounding lyrics that can be related to the war that the United States and Isreal are waging against Iran. Not to mention the crises that surround it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA82c4YkAZ4
The song in question is First Light by Lana Del Rey, it will be used for the title sequence of a soon to be released James Bond game, 007:First Light.
In short, we're screwed and there is nothing that i can do about it.
peaceloveandapostacy@reddit
There’s much talk of CO2 PPM… I’d like to see CH4 plotted on a graph as well. Thanks for all the fish.
godlords@reddit
It follows the same exact cycle, oscillating between 400 and 700 ppb for the past 800,000 years. We're at about 2000ppb now.
Shifting_Baseline@reddit
Itakethngzclitorally@reddit
Emission Accomplished
godlords@reddit
Take that, Al Gore.
powertodream@reddit
at least were not building energy hungry data centers everywhere
Lost_Birthday_3138@reddit
And voting for a con man who said global warming is a Chinese hoax
HomoExtinctisus@reddit
Termination Event intensifies.
NyriasNeo@reddit
"drill baby drill" won and keep on winning.
Middle-Bed-1883@reddit
Greed will win every day.
Lost_Birthday_3138@reddit
And stupidity
church-rosser@reddit
Love beats the demon.
Democrat_maui@reddit
Drmanntisstoboggan@reddit
Relaaaax guy, temperature has always fluctuated on earth… this is normal../s
MezcalFlame@reddit
Fake news! No one was around back then to measure.
/s
mushy_cactus@reddit
Mother nature will sort it out, one way or another.
srekkas@reddit
by killing ofenders.
Sol_Infra@reddit
With or without our consent also.
gmuslera@reddit
And the best governments compromise that we are getting on this is the mythical net-zero, that won’t stop emissions, but somehow will compensate emissions of today with actions that might, hypothetically, if things don’t get worse, campfire over the years that amount of emissions. And by 2060.
430 ppm? Those will be rookie numbers compared with what’s coming in the next few decades.
Unfair-Suggestion-37@reddit
Don't forget the methane and other CO equivalents!
Vegetable_Ferret8984@reddit
There is so many people walking around with brain damage because of this. Let alone we just added sars cov 2 to the list and we are looking at a grim future. Put your n95 on and resist or just be apart of the problem
StatementBot@reddit
The following submission statement was provided by /u/wanton_wonton_:
What to say?
Here's some lyrics from Muse:
Link: https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1sw6fwl/atmospheric_co₂_just_topped_430_ppm_highest_in_35/oid8oid/
Empty-Equipment9273@reddit
Isn’t the co2 eq meaning if we take in all other ghg like nitrous oxide and methane and sf6 into account it’s well over 500ppm
johannesfranco13@reddit
How is the long-term planet catastrophe danger limit defined
wanton_wonton_@reddit (OP)
350 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric CO2 is considered the maximum safe upper limit to maintain a stable climate, prevent severe ice sheet melting, and avoid catastrophic sea-level rise. There's a whole movement lead by Bill McKibben named after it www.350.org But arguably even that limit is set too high.