I posted this in February 2021 when we hadn’t exceeded 420ppm but we went past that figure in 2022. Time we seriously changed the way we live, work, travel and consume.
February 22nd 2021
We like our whole and round number numbers, small and round is what sits well with most of us. So what is 420 in this case? It’s the parts per million molecules of carbon dioxide, CO2, that will be recorded by the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii sometime between now and May as the northern hemisphere turns from Winter to Spring. We were almost there earlier in February which is quite surprising since our climate change generating economies have been hit by the corona virus.
So why’s 420 so important? We live in an interglacial period. Everything we know from the giant leap the human primate made from hunter gatherer to agriculturist has happened in the last 12,000 years or so. Now everything the human primate does has been affecting the configuration of the planet in very subtle ways. Everyone talks about cars and aircraft but even farming throws up dust. Some of that dust rains down on the Greenland ice sheets providing nutrients for algae to darken the surface of the ice reducing the albedo of the surface and hence aiding climate change. That’s just one example and a story in itself.
Currently the Earth has been going through a number of ice ages. Over the last glaciations stretching back 800,000 years, at the height of the interglacial, like we are here in 2021, the CO2 level has been around 280ppm CO2 and this amount of CO2 has dropped to 180ppm at the height of the glaciation so we have a fairly good record of what the ice age CO2 cycle looks like. It gets more interesting. The ice ages themselves stretch back to 2.58 million years ago and this level of greenhouse gas hasn’t been seen in the atmosphere since before then. Many millions of years before then depending on the research that you look at.
What’s quite scary is the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2. This screen shot from Mauna Loa last year shows we hit 417ppm. It doesn’t sound much to most people in what’s 3ppm over a period of 12 months? It’s huge, that’s what it is. That rate of increase hasn’t been seen in perhaps between 30 and 50,000,000 years. Now compare that to the time that the human species has really been messing with the system, 12,000 years and you can see that there’s a very high probability that our actual human numbers and the way we live our lives is the cause of that CO2 increase. We have changed the processes that govern the planet and humans will reap the “benefits” and very soon. That big bad wolf of climate change may not have come knocking at your door yet but it won’t be long before he does. It’s therefore time to change the way we live, work, travel and consume. This entails changing our economics because they are disconnected from physical reality and it also means stabilising the human population and slowly reducing it to a sustainable level.
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Paul Noël 