Carbon dioxide toxicity and climate change: a serious unapprehended risk | Hacker News Reader

Carbon dioxide toxicity and climate change: a serious unapprehended risk

researchgate.net

115 pointsgraeme94 comments

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."

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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.)

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.

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!

> 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

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.

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.

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.

For waste-stream based fuels, consider first that the upper bound on potential is the incoming feedstock, that is, food, and nets to something like 25% of its energy potential.

And the feedstock is bounded by net primary primary productivity, also referred to as the photosynthetic ceiling. It turns out that humans already lay claim to 20% of this. Replacing fossil fuels (a prerequisite to acheiving net zero emissions) would require another 20% of NPP, an unlikely scenario.

Using crop yields and land area, one quickly realises that under all but the rosiest scenarios, more land is required for biomass fuel production than exists in major technological and industrial nations.

So, no, biomass is not sufficient to sustain present per-capita energy use and populations.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_int...

you can also use the sea with wastewater as feedstock: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/OMEGA/index.html

Interesting, though still bounded by the photosynthetic ceiling, and you're competing with all other marine life.

To summarize my thoughts on the topic, no we cannot use food crops and arable land for energy production, no biomass is not sufficient, and a nexus of solutions will be required. Managing and integrating those solutions is where the complexity comes into play. If you're deploying a nexus of solutions it doesn't matter as much if some of the technologies are immature, you can structure them to cover each other's deficiencies (similar to the computer security concept of defense in depth).

I was mostly responding to the original poster's feeling of hopelessness and arguing that solutions are possible and are being developed.

I really appreciated your response. People keep saying humanity is going to go extinct and it seems like we have too much time and technology for that to happen. I still wonder if the thing we need even more than tech to reduce CO2 is agreements to stop and reverse population growth. I don't think Earth can sustainably support more than 4B people. It feels like we need as much time as possible to truly move to renewables but population explosion just reduces the time available.

On the other hand, the more humans that exist, the more people are available to solve these problems (and solve them faster!)

So, you burn coal, then feed the CO2 to algae and together with solar energy, it binds it back to some relatively storable form.

What's the quantitative difference compared to not building a coal plant, a coal mine, transportation network and the algae plant, and instead building solar panels and wind turbines and feeding the electricity to the grid?

I don't have numbers for you, and I don't buy "clean coal", but I would counter with this question; is it better to build a solar or wind farm, or to retrofit a coal fired power plant to burn algae? And then to recycle that carbon into more algae? Isn't that a kind of solar power plant?

(Getting your hands of negatively-value nutrients in order to make the system work is left as an exercise. Or I just don't have all the answers.)

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

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.

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...

edit: as well as active Seawater greenhouses at the shores with humid air pumped: 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.

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.

You assume that the crop -> biofuel process is as efficient as the crop -> biochar process.

Yes, is there any reason to think that there'll be more than a factor of 2 difference? Fossil fuels will tend to have a higher hydrogen to carbon ratio than charcoal but the energy per carbon isn't that different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_intensity

Bogs are, hectare for hectare, more productive than forests.

> 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!

> 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.

> 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!

That's true albeit I think we need another level.

Don't be an activist, things are too large for one person.

Be a socialist

jokes aside, we all can start doing something, but

1) what exactly ?

2) how to coordinate

3) without falling into politics hell

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1) I really wonder how we could help purify air. More plants ? that might absorb some CO2, what about other molecules ? What about vacuums in sewer pipes ? enough to cause a little depression near ground that would suck part of the exhaust gas in places where they can be processed.

2) see above for planting and tweaking cities then 3) .. have no idea

Its worth noting that the world on average is 14% more green today than 20 years ago.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36130346

The reality is that no one really know whats going to happen. Maybe we are doomed maybe we will do just fine, maybe an astroid will hit earth before we find out.

Personally i dont think there is much we can do other than to charge on, keep growing our economies and develop new technologies and solutions to the problems nature always have presented us with.

Maybe it's a rate ratio. 14% more green but 50% more toxic particles ?

Not knowledgeable.

Anyway, I could tolerate a lot more green anyway :)

That's the point. We don't know and any claim to knowing exactly what's going to happen is simply charletanian.

We know that earth is warming, we know humans have some effect but not how much, we know that it can have consequences that the oceans are rising but so far we haven't really been able to predict how it's going to affect things (there is natural erosion from the oceans which is unrelated to humans)

I think the debate could be a lot more rational if people didn't paint themselves into corners such as the "climate catastrophist" and "climate deniers" in reality there is a lot of things we all agree on but these extreme views are taking everyone hostage to the point were I can't even comment on this without being downvoted (instead of pointing to where someone disagree). The debate certainly has gotten 50% more toxic :)

No, we are pretty sure what is going to happen. You work with the evidence you have, what you know, not what you don't know. We cannot continue to 'grow' our economies, our economies need to fundamentally change. Unconstrained growth is economic cancer.

The third industrial revolution will by necessity change what we currently understand economies to be:

https://impact.vice.com/en_us/article/bj5zaq/watch-vices-new...

We are sure that the planet is warming we are not sure how much humans affect this and what it will mean.

If you want to stand a chance against whether you fear the environment will do to you need growth to be able to pay for the development of new technologies.

Here is the paradox you are dealing with.

We also know that growth and free markets help those who have access to it get out of poverty and much more prosperity. That means at least a couple of billion more people are hoping to get what you and I have.

Are you going to tell them they can't have what you have? And if you are what are you going to offer them in return that they would care about. They don't care about the environment in any shape or form that you or me or any other westerner does.

This is the paradox we are dealing with. If there is a third industrial revolution it certainly won't be based on the sharing economy that's not how humans work.

> We also know that growth and free markets help those who have access to it get out of poverty and much more prosperity.

Growth and free markets are what is driving overconsumption

They also drive prosperity and have provided us with plenty of ways to deal with mother nature who's always been rough on us.

If you think that living 200 years ago was a better life for most people just because they had more nature and couldn't consume as much I think you would be mistaken.

You can't have your cake and eat it.

Growth and prosperity comes with its own problems and challenges but I take those any day over an antigrowth philosophy.

You really need to deal with your straw-man fixation, or at least reserve it for people that may be impressed with it.

'Growth' as you are defining it, is unsustainable. Do you you know what 'unsustainable' means? It means it must stop. Not 'has to', 'would be nice to' but 'must'. It has a hard physical thermodynamic ceiling. Your philosophy has no future.

First of all you need to learn what a strawman is.

Second of all my philosophy of using technology to solve the problems that nature presents to us has no future? I am not sure what you are doing here using a computer then or why you are wasting time and energy on a website debating with strangers.

I'll probably come off as a spoiled Westerner here, but that's not my intent.

Isn't it a bit presumptuous to assume that everyone in impoverished parts of the world even _want_ the kind of prosperity we have? It seems to be taken for granted that all the drawbacks to modern civilization are outweighed by the benefits. But then, isn't this the same mindset that has set us on this course of man-made global heating?

I suppose I'm advocating for leaving other countries to decide their own paths and not trying to push our prosperity onto them. If that makes me a greedy Westerner, so be it. I don't exactly enjoy my society, anyway.

So somehow magically all the countries who are rich today are the countries that want it and the other countries somehow magically don't or what is your point?

Even if there were a few countries that didn't want their kids to survive simple diseases have enough food to feed their family or not have to worry about the safety of their family I am fairly certain that most countries want that.

I am also fairly certain that you are not willing to trade all these "drawbacks" of modern society for a life in an unmodern society and even if you were it would most likely be a very short-lived desire.

Which countries exactly is it you think don't want the kind of growth we have in the west?

Not sure I understand what you are trying to show here.

He doesn't really have a point except to try to justify tanking the standard of living. As a preemptive attempt to justifying literal communism in 2018. Communists know that they cannot implement their vision while maintaining the current standard of living, so they want to tank it.

I'm not trying to "show" anything, just advocating for allowing other societies the opportunity for self-determination rather than pushing on them what we think is best.

Self-determination is a long and arduous process. It took the U.S. over 250 years to get to where we are (much longer if you consider how much we borrowed from Britain). We've paid a hefty price in mental health along the way.

We can provide healthcare and other benefits of modern society through trade without forcing these things on them, although that would admittedly take longer. It could be that poorer countries decide they value traditional culture and avoiding wastefulness (and the climate impacts this brings with it) to convenience and glamor. I don't know, it's not my place to say.

Other societies HAVE that opportunity they just didn't choose it and those who can't choose it are desperate to get invited to the club.

So not sure what makes you think other societies don't want the kind prosperity to their citizens we have in the west.

Not sure what you mean with providing healthcare for them as if it wouldn't be better they themselves were able to provide healthcare.

I would urge you to rethink your position. Not because I want to decide what you think but because it's not really founded in anything of thise world.

I'm a westerner. But I lived a bit in tropical parts who where very different in lifestyles. I'm also an ex tech-lover (my generation was fed on it). Nowadays, I think I'd enjoy a bit of green between 10 to 1000x more than a UHD Qdot LCD and fiber connection.

I think that our lifestyles is toxic, especially for other places (africa, asia), for us too (stress, sadness, different diseases).. anyway, we replaced one kind of life struggle with another one.

And I do feel sad that 3rd world is somehow envying, even though it's not surprising, western life is pure eye candy, and designed to be so.

And I heard a few people leaving big western cities to go into medium ones, for the difference of pace and life quality (more space, more green).

If you have children I am pretty sure you would agree that modern society is the best place to be without any real competition.

We know that the planet is warming, we know humans are responsible for the vast majority of that change, and we know what it will mean for the biosphere and the things that depend on that, i.e you and I. I'm not sure why you think we do not. There is 20km of air between the ground and space, you can breathe in the first 5km of that. We have been pumping billions of tons of C02 into that 5km for the last 200 years, what did you thing was going to happen, nothing ?

The next bit of your post exemplifies exactly the king of thinking that brought us to this point in human history. And then you end with the silly strawmen, seriously ? Do you really think 3rd world countries are going to repeat the same mistakes, why will they build coal plants when they can have of the shelf solar plants for a fraction of the price ?

I think first you need to learn what a strawman actually means.

Yes the 3rd world absolutely wants the prosperity we have. You might disagree with that (and you would be hard-pressed to find many countries who don't aspire) but it's certainly no strawman. But hey keep telling yourself that so you don't have to deal with the facts.

With regards to whether humans are responsible for that vast majority of the change again it's not as clear cut as I am sure you would like to portray it. None the less even if that was the case it's certainly not going to be solved by stopping countries from aspiring for more prosperity for their citizens.

> how we could help purify air

Really you have to solve the politics first; unless you can persuade people to care about others and that the problems are worth solving, more so than increasing their personal wealth, it's not going very far.

I believe in local organic self motivated test fiesta. The rest may follow

Solar & wind have already over taken nuclear.

Even so, we need to eliminate stockpiles, waste. Traveling wave reactors (TWR) seems like the best technical bet. Maybe we'd get some electricity out of it.

(I'm not clear why we don't drop radioactive waste onto the Marianas Trench and let the earth eventually devour it.)

If the container leaks, radionuclides might seep out which could be bad news (flowing with currents or ingested by fish).

Solving the political issues at Yucca would be a great permanent solution to waste.

I sort of expected everything to be turned into glass (vitrification) by now.

I'm terrified of what's happening in at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. My friends (who work on this issue) tell me that when the toxic plum seeps thru the water table all the way to the Columbia River, everything down stream becomes uninhabitable. That's Portland, Vancouver (WA), etc.

I really want someone to figure out how to turn all that crap into glass trinkets and then drop into deepest ocean.

> Solar & wind have already over taken nuclear.

Solar and wind have rapidly come down in price, which is awesome. However, due to their variable nature, they do suffer from the problem of declining value as their grid penetration increases.

So there is a place for dispatchable capacity. If your country has enough dispatchable renewables like hydro or geothermal, awesome. If not, there's not that many good options. Nuclear, and maybe fossil and/or biofuels (in general, I'm very skeptical wrt large-scale biofule use, so this ought to be very limited) with CCS. Batteries and demand shifting are good for short-term bursts, and will likely replace gas in that role, but for large scale shifting they are way too expensive.

I'm very much a fan of the work Jesse Jenkins is doing in power systems modeling, see e.g.

https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/events/getting-zero-pathway...

> Even so, we need to eliminate stockpiles, waste. Traveling wave reactors (TWR) seems like the best technical bet. Maybe we'd get some electricity out of it.

Last I read, the company behind the TWR (TerraPower) is mostly focusing on a fast spectrum molten salt reactor nowadays. Which is cool, I'm a big fan of the fast MSR as a concept. That being said, while breeding would allow us to increase the utilization of nuclear fuel by about two orders of magnitude, at the moment uranium is so cheap that it's not seen as economically worthwhile.

But, if nuclear is going to play a major role in the world's energy supply, breeders will eventually be necessary. So I do think we should develop them.

> (I'm not clear why we don't drop radioactive waste onto the Marianas Trench and let the earth eventually devour it.)

The waste problem is more political than technical. Burying the waste deep in bedrock is perfectly good.

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/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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Where do you live?

> 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.

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/...

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.

Even a few percentage points should be enough to cause concern at a global scale.

Couldn't we measure this against aggregate trends in cognitive scoring across different regions over time?

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.

“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.

>"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.

> 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?

>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_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/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

Anyway we'll probably be immortal cyborgs by the time it kicks off ;)

> CO2 was 10x higher in the past. Life bloomed

Just not mammalian life, or most of the higher order life we know and love. ;)

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.

Well that was worrying. Now I'm sitting here in my air-conditioned office building wondering what the CO₂ level is and wishing I could open a window.

Got to buy a CO₂ meter: https://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=CO2+meter

I think good AC is actually ok, since it's based on venting indoor air out. Definitely depends on the building though.

But my CO2 meter reads lower with AC on. (With windows closed. Windows open is power still)

If your AC is the type that vents out indoor air then this makes sense (though smaller AC units tend to just circulate the indoor air after cooling/dehydrating). Depending on the sensor technology in your CO2 meter, it could be sensitive to temperature, so that may be worth trying to exclude as a factor.

‘You and your children and grandchildren are going to suffocate’ sounds like a much better way for people to get across the dangers of burning fossil fuel than the vague threat of climate change. It’s personal and horrifying to contemplate.

That's what I was thinking. The warming and climate destabilization effects will be worse (ugh), but this is perhaps easier to describe.

"You know that feeling of a stuffy meeting room? That's what outside will be in 2100 if we don't reduce. Inside will be worse."

Increase in co2 equals increase in plant growth. A sealed greenhouse pumped with higher concentration of co2 than normal saw plants grow faster.

Point of view is that co2 may not be absorbed quickly enough or that there may be a limit to the amount that plants can take in: https://www.carbonbrief.org/rising-co2-has-greened-worlds-pl...

I agree with your statement and would like to add to your comment:

I don't understand when people point to bio mass that could absorb the carbon. This is based on my understanding of carbon history on this planet, which is far from detailed or complete.

We already had the earth covered in biomass before human populations increased explosively. Back then, a looooooong time ago, what as far as I know brought the carbon levels (CO2) down was when dying bio mass was getting buried instead of being recycled. That means most carbon is underneath the earth.

We just spend the last few centuries busily getting it back out from there though.

So as I understand it (someone correct me please if it is wrong), how can we possibly hope that a biomass cycle could keep enough carbon trapped? The past shows that it has to be buried deep inside the earth! That would mean biomass cannot be the solution, even at full capacity it could not bind enough.

I'm happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong.

You can get a certain amount out of growing additional live biomass where there isn't any now.

There was a supposition that one of the causes of the Little Ice Age was reforestation of the Americas after plagues wiped out 90% of the inhabitants. I don't know what the current state of that conjecture is, but I recall the amount of carbon taken up in the process was significant.

If you found a way to eg forest the Sahara, it would be significant on a global scale. Not a one-and-done fix, but significant. Then you would either have to find new land to plant or cut down the trees and not burn them/mulch them to sequester more carbon, but a living forest holds a good bit on its own.

There is a fascinating project to turn around desertification of the Sahara: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall

For the "short" term (next century or so) it's sufficient to take it out of the atmosphere and bury it either as solid carbon in the soil or as gaseous compressed CO2 in fairly shallow rock formations.

There are other geologic-time processes which can stabilise things over a longer time period, but it's the short time scale that makes it hard to adapt.

This is true if the CO2 increase is the only change. Unfortunately increased atmospheric CO2 leads to higher temperatures, which stops plants growing. In the short term we'll have more plant growth, but if the temperature increase isn't halted it'll stop being so beneficial. There's also an upper limit to which plants are able to photosynthesise in rich CO2 environments - too much CO2 and a plant can't get enough energy to grow, so that stops it too. And lastly, if a plant has a very rich CO2 environment it stops taking on as much nitrogen, which means they're not so useful as food crops. They grow, but we can't eat them.

So yeah, plants can grow more when there's more CO2 around, but that's not the whole story.

I’ve wondered for a while—very non-scientifically, just idly—if atmospheric CO₂ could account for increased rates of neurological/psychological conditions such as ASD (autism spectrum disorder) and ADD (attention deficit disorder)—to a degree not explained by more obvious factors like increased visibility into the existence of these conditions and ability to diagnose them. Is there any good research into such a correlation, or is it just absurd?

At first blush I find it very hard to believe. Your body might have to work a tiny bit harder to maintain homeostasis (since more CO2 in the atmosphere = more ventilation needed to expel it from your blood), but we're dealing with such low levels - and such small changes - that it sounds very improbable to me.

I'm blocked from the PDF link. This may be the same article, although it's dated 2016: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Carbon-dioxide-toxicit...

The link goes to html now. Same author, but it's a 2017 working paper.

> 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.

Oh, that's scary. How often does that happen in small offices converted into open offices?! I've often noticed people acting strangely, missing small bugs or acting confused. I have a CO2 detector at home but those are only for extreme levels. How would someone check for unhealthy but not deadly concentrations?

I wouldn't worry about it. OP is massively cherrypicking studies. That particular citation is an unreplicated experiment which contradicts literally scores or hundreds of other experiments going back half a century or more, including dozens sponsored by the US Navy investigating cognitive performance at CO2 concentrations all the way up to 20,000 PPM and higher, finding jack squat (which is why submarines are allowed to have such high CO2 levels, which saves on scrubbers & range). Here's one book reviewing CO2 studies: https://www.nap.edu/read/11170/chapter/5#54 For comparison, your bedroom will routinely get to 1-3000 PPM while you sleep for 8-10 hours daily even if you leave the door open; have you noticed any ill effects or that you are borderline retarded while in your bedroom? Probably not... And see my discussion in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pPZ27eZdBXtGuLqZC/what-is-up...

Since you have to go to 10,000 PPM or even 60,000 PPM to start finding serious effects of CO2, it's very hard to believe that the Satish effect is real or of the staggering magnitude claimed, or that global warming will, by increasing average CO2 PPMs by at most a few hundred over a century, will have much of an effect. (Not to mention that it would be easy to offset with office plants+better ventilation even if you buy the story.)

Please mark the title with [pdf] tag, as it auto downloads.

I just got an HTML version with a link to download the PDF, no auto download.

Sorry about that. I think they may have switched the link to an html.

Maybe a side business figure out how to e sure building air systems are pumping the correct balance of air for maximum lung efficiency... like pumping O2 into the room but with filters to remove and correctly balance the air. For that matter it seems like some longer term studies to determine what balance if air actually leads to longer life

Very sci-fi; suddenly we need a life support system inside our offices because we've ruined the air. Maybe borrow some of these from the ISS:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/200502...

There are many solutions to the problems that Earth's atmosphere faces. One of the solutions is Accelerated Silicate Weathering[1]. Everyone likes to talk about how screwed we are, but that is yesterday's discussion. Today's discussion is this: How hard are you going to work today and for the rest of the year and for the rest of the decade on advancing the many solutions we have available to this problem? Are you going to be a hero, or are you going to fear-monger? The future of the planet depends on the readers of this comment (and the writer of it, for that matter) more than any of us can know. That's right. It is your personal responsibility to advance the efforts to reduce pollution and C02 levels. Do not abandon us.

[1] https://www.eoas.ubc.ca/~mjelline/453website/eosc453/E_print...

Raise of CO2 level is because of incoming glacial period, not a global warming [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacial_period#/media/File:Co2...

The current level is at 400 ppm, while that graph only goes to 300.

I'm not sure how they argue that ice core CO2 is representative for the earth, but on the face of it I wouldn't compare Mauna Loa measurements (from near the equator and at thousands of feet above sea level on the largest active volcano on the planet) with those directly above the Antarctic surface.

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