God damn it.
Obligatory and even more appropriate than usual.
My asthma & bronchitis thanks the Industrial World.
Smells like freedom!
Close enough.
The right-wing analysis: “It’s not possible to reduce CO2 levels to what they were millions of years ago or even 200 years ago. Therefore, it’s best to do absolutely nothing.”
Weird, that’s the same logic the NRA uses when discussing deaths caused by firearms…
Even if you believe some kind of alternative atmospheric physics where CO2 doesn’t trap heat, this increase is going to disrupt oceanic ecosystems through acidification.
Blah blah natural process, blah blah hippie nonsense, blah blah conspiracy by big polar bear
- nothing to improve the situation - making it worse is fine by (and often profitable for) us
fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK! 
(i have kids and i’m ashamed of what we’ve done to this planet in my lifetime…)
Since it was this high 4 million years ago, surely that means humans didn’t cause it.
Already has and did.
And continues to. To shocking levels.
Plus the ocean is a whole lot warmer.
And the co2 is dissolved. In there.
So we are seeing tropical fish show up in northern climes. We’re seeing aquatic life in places it’s not supposed to be. Imagine fishing off the coast of Alaska for Marlin. That’s funny.
And will never happen. Because not enough sunlight makes it there.
Tropical fish are bathed in solar energy. As are the plants and animals they require.
Alaska is all about being fat to survive. Oily fish. Whales. Etc…
Alaska with warm water doesnt get the sun it needs.
The number of fish who are evolved to live in an environment like that are zero.
Didn’t a new reef just start bleaching?
We should try to quickly evolve into plants. The plants are going to love this. All of their carbon content comes from atmospheric co2.
They’ve evolved for lower CO2 than this. We will be losing some plants too. What will love it are the algae.
Probably so. It is not a subject I am expert on. I did try to look at some botany sites to see the optimum CO2 level for plant growth. But it makes sense that they would focus on certain genera, where others would have different requirements. I suppose this is one of the situations with so many interconnected factors that predicting long range results will be very complicated.
One of the things I’m beginning to wonder is what subtle long-term psychological effects impacts people with chronic exposure to CO2 levels that are now nearly double what the species rose to civilization with. As usual, we understand the impacts of acute exposures, but long term or chronic exposure is hard to study (you can’t put someone in a 280ppm environment for a lifetime and study them as a control), and therefore, little understood.
It is highly unlikely that this increase in atmospheric CO2 levels has any direct effects on humans. Our bodies produce CO2 and are used to dealing with high concentrations of it. The air in our lungs contains more than 4% (that’s 40,000 ppm) CO2 by the time we exhale, so those few extra hundreds of ppm are just a drop in the bucket.
No, we just did.
Seriously. I had a teacher in the 4th grade (1985) that showed us the Lorax cartoon as a warning to our generation. I turned 40 this month, and cannot believe that the film is coming true in my lifetime.
