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Comment by ArkanExplorer | Hacker News Reader

These higher CO2 levels (890ppm) are already a problem indoors. Ventilation systems become less effective as outdoor CO2 levels increase. Many houses and apartments around the world have no ventilation systems at all.

Its... mind boggling, or collectively insane, that we are doing so little. We risk stupefying ourselves into inaction since CO2 also has negative cognitive impacts.

For starters we need to shut down all coal plants and thermal coal mines (physically occupy them if necessary), cease manufacturing new ICE vehicles, and tariff any countries that don't impose carbon prices.

I highly recommend that everyone reading this buy an air quality monitor (CO2 + Pm2.5) so that you can at least monitor your own indoor CO2 levels.

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I agree. Many people essentially live in sealed boxes that only receive ventilation through cracks and the occasionally opened door or window. My home averages around 800 ppm and that is with a fresh air ventilation system that is constantly running to exchange the air. If I turn off the ventilation system, I measure CO2 levels over 1300 ppm within a matter of hours. CO2 levels above 950 ppm are associated with significant impairments to cognitive function.[1]

[1] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27662232/4892924...

Not sure why this was downvoted: it's an entirely correct [0] and a very relevant take on the OP study. If you're drawing inferences on future human health impacts from the OP, you should be drawing similar inferences about indoor air pollution, today.

[0] e.g. https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/chemical/carbondioxide.htm

> For starters we need to shut down all coal plants and thermal coal mines (physically occupy them if necessary), cease manufacturing new ICE vehicles, and tariff any countries that don't impose carbon prices.

Fortunately we already have a cheaper alternative to coal, and are making the factories to deploy this solution as fast as we can.

This is especially important given we need to reduce global emissions by at least 99% and keep it that low for the next thousand years or so.

If we didn’t have better cheaper options, you simply wouldn’t be able to convince enough foreign governments to shut down their plants and mines with any level of tariffs at all (look at North Korea or Cuba for the effectiveness of the harshest trade restrictions the USA can pursue), never mind sustaining that economic pressure for the millennium-long atmospheric lifetime of CO2, and even doing so unilaterally would just make you poorer and industry relocate.

Good thing PV and batteries are cheaper than coal or gasoline, and are still getting cheaper. The combination should be cheaper than natural gas in a few years, PV by itself already is.

> Fortunately we already have a cheaper alternative to coal, and are making the factories to deploy this solution as fast as we can.

Are we really?

If coal power suddenly cost five times as much, you don't think we'd be making those factories a lot faster?

> Are we really?

Yes. PV production in particular is following an exponential trend, about 37% per year compound, roughly tenfold growth every 7 years 4 months.

If this exponential doesn’t turn out to be a sigmoid in disguise, all power (not just electricity, everything) will be green by the end of 2031.

> If this exponential doesn’t turn out to be a sigmoid in disguise

I'd put a lot of money on this in fact being the case, but I take your point that it matters how long there (roughly linear) part of the curve lasts.

I don't know. I'm imagining a parallel dimension where coal is cheaper and solar is growing exponentially at 20% per year. And someone is using that exponential growth to argue they're making solar panels factories "as fast as they can" even though they're completely wrong.

15 years ago, coal was cheaper relative to PV. PV had roughly the same average compound growth rate then as now.

Is there anything you can buy to reduce indoor CO2 levels without exchanging outdoor air? Is bubbling air through a tank of algae the only solution available to consumers? I'd love some product recommendations from HN, if anyone has one.

Air exchange is the most economical solution. You can’t stuff enough plants in a typical home to make a measurable difference and there are other pollutants such as VOCs that air exchange will address. Here are the two least expensive options I know of:

1) Get a CO2 monitor and partially open a couple windows whenever the level is above 800 ppm. Cost: $60.

2) Get a good air filter such as an IQAir HealthPro+ and pair it with a ducting adapter such as https://www2.iqair.com/sites/default/files/documents/InFlowW.... This will allow you to constantly exchange your indoor air with filtered fresh air. If you don’t want to install a wall intake for the duct, you can connect it to a window adapter like what is used for portable A/C units. Cost: $1,500.

Ive been very happy with this one. Bought it mainly for fire season out here in California but seems good for monitoring the collapse of human civilization too.

https://www.amazon.com/humai-HI-100-Quality-Device-House/dp/...

CO2 and PM2.5 require different sensors, so buyers need to be very cautious that their model explicitly includes both, and states CO2 as a ppm value.

Costs are about $70. They're also available on AliExpress.

It doesn’t track co2. You can have 0 pm2.5 and still be in a stuffy room with too much carbon dioxide (which is quite common in Poland in Winter for example. Air cleaners remove pm2.5, people keep windows shut to keep pollution and cold air from getting in, and they get crazy amounts of co2 indoors).

Just talking about CO2 has negative cognitive impacts, as this thread demonstrates. People will apply any stretch of the mind they can to avoid having to face the problem.

The remarkable collective insanity is that we can't be sane collectively. It takes only a minority to make collective action impossible and individual action pointless.

So you can buy an air monitor but all it's going to do is affirm that the inevitable is actually happening.

I don't think what you describe as 'insanity' is at all confined to climate change though. It actually seems weird to me to be surprised that we find it hard to take collective action on this.

We're talking about a (in relation to a human lifetime) gradual process, with costs relatively far in the future. Experimental evidence shows all sorts of costs are exponentially discounted over time — so why should this be any different, for people taking individual actions or deciding whether to elect pro-environmental governments? Other problems are just more pressing: what to feed your kids without them whining about vegetarian food; how to pay the rent; how to get promoted if this requires long distance travel; enjoying time with friends and family if they live at a distance.

Most people, in most places, at least acknowledge the issue. It doesn't mean they're jumping up to pay the costs, but it's an ordinary discussion about responsibility and economics rather than an assault on science.

The delusions are largely limited to one country, for whom this is not merely about the difficulty of collective action but a paranoid belief that it's a massive global hoax. That's a whole new level of delusion.

If people aren’t going to combat climate change on the bases of mass extinction and threat to all advanced civilization as we know it, I don’t expect they will be persuaded by ill health effects.

I wouldn't count on that necessarily. Mass extinction and threat to all advanced civilization seems abstract, your own ill health seems more personal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences) You often see news stories with a personal frame to drive them home, rather than a situational frame.

Though I don't know, indeed, you might have it right, it might make no difference.

> your own ill health seems more personal

Hundreds of millions ignore the obesity impact on their health. And that’s something you can feel right away. I seriously doubt people are going to pay attention to something so intangible.

I doubt they ignore it. People that are obese and fine with it are a minority. That doesn't mean it's easy to stop being obese. Compared to obesity, CO2 doesn't have genetic factors, the science on it is clear, there are easy solutions to monitor it. You could also do something like make people do a test in a CO2-heavy room and in a CO2-light room. On the other hand, you can't show obese people what it's like to not be obese, or non obese people what it's like to be. The two situations are very different.

We’re not appropriately concerned with air pollution even though it affects our personal health today.

I thought the same thing then I saw how people freaked out over COVID and it gave me some hope. I thought masks would never catch on as much as they did. So perhaps there’s room for manipulating people into effective action if we can find the right triggers.

The right triggers have already been known forever. Look at the history of recycling campaigns in Texas.

Bet you didn't know "don't mess with Texas" is about recycling.

Unfortunately, toxic machismo is likely not going to work, especially nation wide, for things based purely in science. Seems pretty incompatible.

It’s not people, it’s corporations that are the problem. Polling shows that >70% of people support legislation to combat climate change.

In agreement. Average citizen preferences have no bearing[1] on the adoption of legislation.

[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

I frequently try to express this to people and I don't know how to get it across sometimes. Our representative republic has been so clogged up by corporate interests that we can't even pass infrastructure that would benefit most of those same corporate interests at this point. I have basically zero faith that we will be able to address climate change in any meaningful way.

False. It’s not that hard to fool yourself into thinking that you will be able to navigate the societal disruption that will be caused by climate change, especially if you have money. If you have the resources you can move north, pay more for food, hide behind the security services. But no one wants to imagine living inside a literal bubble or seeing their grandkids crippled by CO2 poisoning. Escaping the heat and its effects is one thing—it’s entirely a different thing to have to escape the atmosphere.

> it’s entirely a different thing to have to escape the atmosphere.

Right, you’d think people would care about water as well [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/eHCaIvPN2rY

Long term water supply definitely influenced my decision on where I wanted to live.

Water pollution like this is a localized phenomenon. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is not. What the study is saying is that there may be no environmentally safe outdoor spaces anywhere in the world at the end of the century. This has never been the case previously, even when environmental pollution has gotten out of control in certain places.

It’s not about it being local(which I bet it’s not anyway). The point is that we can witness an example of people literally drinking mud. And they still continue polluting what’s left of the water.

'Advanced civilization' is the reason the human animal is deeply sick; if we saw any other animal population with 15% requiring psychiatric medication, [1], 40% obese [2], with fertility rates plummeting below replacement rate [3], we would conclude that this animal species was deeply distressed and experiencing a social collapse reminiscent of those observed in Calhoun's rat utopias. [4] But because we evolved a highly capable rationalization mechanism, people are able to convince themselves that things are OK even as various trends worsen. (A common justification is 'we're not animals, we can ignore out instincts - meanwhile, everything we do is driven by instinct.)

Even from an environmental perspective, sure, burning fossil fuels isn't sustainable and has disastrous ecological impacts. I agree. So does battery production, microchip production, industrialized farming, etc. We are polluting and destroying the ecosphere with all of our 'advanced' civilization, not just climate change. The air and water are filled with all kinds of man-made poisons, not just fossil fuels, and we're inventing more every day.

This is not a problem that can be solved with more technology.

That's why I don't worry too much about climate change. If it gives us a systemic collapse sooner rather than an even worse one later, that's a good thing. More people will survive at a higher level of culture. I don't see anything upsetting about this. People thrived most of the time for most of human history prior to the Industrial Revolution.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db380.htm [2] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html [3] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/pro...

>(physically occupy them if necessary)

This sounds like a mealy mouthed way of advocating for violence

> For starters we need to shut down all coal plants and thermal coal mines (physically occupy them if necessary)

So are you personally enlisting in the marines or somewhere else? Also, who’s gonna pay for green energy for a billion Asians? Since it’s them who’s adding most new coal plants.

i dont understand comments like this. could you let me know what the purpose of this reply is?

how do you know if it has been effective?

It’s easy to say “occupy if necessary” sitting on a couch. It’s ridiculous how people throw words like this. And statistically speaking, the majority of commentators here never even held an assault rifle in their lives.

> effective

Oh, I don’t care.

==And statistically speaking, the majority of commentators here never even held an assault rifle in their lives.==

Has nothing to do with anything, but enjoy puffing your chest.

I volunteer to work in the banks freezing the accounts of anyone burning coal. Is that good enough for you?

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