A new 66M-year history of carbon dioxide offers little comfort for today

eurekalert.org

12 points·haltist··5 comments

"In the late 1700s, the air contained about 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO2. We are now up to 420 ppm, an increase of about 50%..."

Yikes! We're like that cartoon character that was speeding off the top of the cliff and now he's hanging suspended in mid air just before dropping to his death.

Fifty percent increase in three hundred years seems like a lot; particularly considering that its all likely to hang around for a thousand years or more. I don't think I can wait that long.

Bit sad that climate is rarely discussed on HN. A mountain of studies indicates our current civilization will completely collapse within this century due to climate.

It is an "industry" ready to be disrupted.

It's rarely discussed because it's impossible to have an open-minded discussion about climate change.

The problem is money. Burning fossil fuels is profitable, not burning them is not. If you want to make money then you must opt into the fossil fuel economy and utilize whatever resources are available to increase GDP. It wouldn't be much of a conceptual leap to consider the global economy a death cult (40k+ drivers are killed every year on the freeway before we even get to side-effects of pollution). Everyone knows what the inevitable endpoint is going to be but no one is willing to do anything about it. But as a techno-optimist and singularitarian I believe AGI will save all of us for a mere $80B so tell all your VC friends how cheaply I can save the world. All I need is the GPUs and compute fabric to build the "panoptic computronium cathedral"™ and enact a world government managed purely by algorithms and math.

Related: https://xkcd.com/1732/

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