Exceeding 1.5°C global warming could trigger multiple climate tipping points

September 22, 2022 7:49 AM

Every tenth of a degree that we can avoid warming the planet is important: Climate tipping points. (research paper)
posted by simmering octagon (43 comments total)

This graphic in the paper appears to be a summary?
posted by gimonca at 8:10 AM on September 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

The central conceit of modernism is that we can disregard the constraints of the natural world in doing and building whatever we want according to our whims because any issues that arise can be conquered by human science and limitless, cheap energy.

Unfortunately it also disregards that human science has since progressed further into understanding that the natural world is much more powerful than we imagined and the systems that support human life are very fragile, and what we thought was limitless, cheap energy is in fact neither.
posted by Jon_Evil at 9:02 AM on September 22, 2022 [26 favorites]

have we been miscalculating the heat index?
posted by supermedusa at 9:19 AM on September 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

human science has since progressed further into understanding that the natural world is much more powerful than we imagined

Does never once having mistaken humanity for something bigger than the planet it lives on make me neuroatypical? I ask because watching countless people, most of them generally reckoned quite sane, make this very mistake over and over and over again has been causing me distress for approximately my whole life.
posted by flabdablet at 9:25 AM on September 22, 2022 [28 favorites]

Same, flabdablet, same. At least we can be hyperaware and distressed together?
posted by BlueJae at 9:42 AM on September 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

flabdablet I'm pretty sure I fall on the more 'neurotypical' end of the scale and I have felt like that my entire adult life. I run the emotional gamut from a terrible sense of dread to a sort of dark glee at watching what has been wrought come to pass.
posted by supermedusa at 9:53 AM on September 22, 2022 [7 favorites]

On August 22, Astronomy Picture of the Day featured the most effective and alarming visualization of how bad things are getting (and how fast they’re getting bad!) that I have ever seen.
posted by jamjam at 10:53 AM on September 22, 2022 [19 favorites]

jamjam one thing I think is particularly useful about that visualization is that it really shows how erratic the temperature variations have become.
posted by supermedusa at 10:56 AM on September 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

> The central conceit of modernism is that we can disregard the constraints of the natural world in doing and building whatever we want according to our whims because any issues that arise can be conquered by human science and limitless, cheap energy.

This might have been the prevailing attitude prior to the '90s, but by now it seems pretty clear to most what the scientific consensus is around the fragility of the environment. So, I believe the current conceits are the following set:
- disbelief/denial
- blind faith (we always muddle through)
- we can't do anything about it (futility)
- we won't do anything about it (I'm alright Jack)
- we have higher priorities (war, economy)
- and a whole bunch of people just DGAF, often because they attach higher importance to their immediate needs/wants (I still wanna truck)

I was sort of encouraged by many aspects of the coordinated responses to the pandemic, but I don't expect that same level of urgency and cooperation here, even in the face of an already noticeably altered climate.

(currently reading Ministry for the Future)
posted by Artful Codger at 11:09 AM on September 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

MetaFilter: At least we can be hyperaware and distressed together
posted by crosley at 11:59 AM on September 22, 2022 [34 favorites]

There's some more about this paper here: https://climatetippingpoints.info/2022/09/09/climate-tipping-points-reassessment-explainer/

It's pretty disturbing that humans could cause so much permanent change, and possibly already have. However, none of them are expected to be self-sustaining global feedback loops. For example abrupt permafrost melting is thought to cause an extra 0.11 C per C by 2300. That's bad, but not the sort of climate bomb people have claimed.
posted by netowl at 12:02 PM on September 22, 2022

mistaken humanity for something bigger than the planet

Well we have been since 10/12/1961 when Yuri Gagarin left for a few days. There have been folks off planet continuously since 2000.

I know it's scifi but all nasty manufacturing will be somewhere off the surface almost instantaneously soon on any historical scale. Can homo sapiens flourish off planet? Maybe not but perhaps homo-crisper-variant will just love to be there.

As for the article, I could not get access but that graphic seemed a bit gathering buzz word hotpoints. (not a denier) but have great skepticism about all specific predictions. It will probably be much much worse that estimates in some regions and little change or improvement in some. Change is coming and it will take new tech and science to mitigate all the issues.
posted by sammyo at 12:03 PM on September 22, 2022

Change is coming and it will take new tech and science to mitigate all the issues.

I consider this to be a malignantly optimistic variation on 'the beatings will continue until morale improves.'
posted by jamjam at 12:15 PM on September 22, 2022 [15 favorites]

I consider this to be a malignantly optimistic variation on 'the beatings will continue until morale improves.'

Yep. Basically "technology will solve all of the problems technology caused." People love this because is absolves them of any responsibility to make whatever meaningful changes they can in their own lives.
posted by drstrangelove at 12:19 PM on September 22, 2022 [11 favorites]

New tech will mitigate some of the issues. But if history is any guide (and I think it is) then a great deal of that new tech will create whole new classes of destruction hitherto undreamed of.

Technology is a power amplifier: always and everywhere, what it does is allow smaller numbers of human beings to make bigger changes to our environment than we'd been able to before its advent. What it doesn't do - never has, arguably never can - is increase our sense of responsibility anywhere near as much as the extent to which it increases our power.

The pickle we're in now is not due to failures of our technologies, but to their successes. We currently have a planet with eight billion people on it, more than have ever existed before, and it's technological advances that have let us do that. Most of that eight billion can also do more things than previous generations have been able to. So we do, because we can, and everything else in the biosphere just has to deal with it.

We've already got plenty of technology and at this point I don't think we need much more. What we need is less hubris. If we don't start getting a lot more judicious, collectively speaking, with the kinds of technologies we pursue and develop and deploy, the likelihood of complete success at fucking our habitat beyond repair will just keep on getting higher.
posted by flabdablet at 12:24 PM on September 22, 2022 [9 favorites]

New tech will mitigate some of the issues FOR SOME OF THE PEOPLE

as noted in detail in the South Asia thread above, the global south is already paying a steep (and climbing) price for the technological arrogance of the global north.
posted by supermedusa at 12:28 PM on September 22, 2022 [12 favorites]

Basically "technology will solve all of the problems technology caused."

aka the credo of the Techbro NRA.
posted by flabdablet at 12:32 PM on September 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

People love this because is absolves them of any responsibility to make whatever meaningful changes they can in their own lives.

This also works with my climate change-denying dad's attitude: the world has always changed temperature throughout its history. This is just another one of those changes, nothing we can do.

Which is awfully convenient for him. Maybe thinking so absolves him from feeling guilty about climate change, or keeps him from having to think about how much capitalism prevents any meaningful changes to climate policy. Maybe it's not that deep and he really does think this is How It Is.

I keep thinking about that tweet (or whatever), to paraphrase: "Climate change will be one viral video after another until you're the one holding the camera." This summer, I was very nearly holding the camera. More rain in one day than in recorded history in the area. Tens of millions of dollars worth of damage in one day. People died. This is the reality we are living, and it will get worse.

Still. Nothing we can do.

Awfully convenient.
posted by gc at 12:35 PM on September 22, 2022 [15 favorites]

Meanwhile in Canada our approach to reducing emissions is to double down on fossil fuel investment.
You wouldn't read about it! (unless you click on the link of course)
posted by piyushnz at 12:35 PM on September 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

This might have been the prevailing attitude prior to the '90s, but by now it seems pretty clear to most what the scientific consensus is around the fragility of the environment.

One of the key problems that I see civilization needing to deal with, and not doing especially well at, is reducing the cycle time between "scientific consensus" and "popular consensus". Democracies, basically by definition, require popular consensus—not just the consensus of government and academic wonks/boffins/technocrats—to implement significant changes.

In the past, changes happened slowly enough that the lag-time between scientists saying "hey, this is a big deal", and the public realizing "wow, this is a big deal" was manageable. But as humanity has become more powerful in our ability to affect complex systems like the planetary climate, that reaction time lag is becoming... dangerous. There is now the real risk that we will do something (like, say, digging up a shitload of fossil hydrocarbons and dumping the carbon into the atmosphere) that will have trigger consequences faster than we can react.

To use a military idiom, the ecosystem has gotten "inside our loop" and is changing faster than we can react to each new change. The normal effect of this, in its original context, was death.

I'd like to think we can maybe avoid that outcome, if I'm being optimistic.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:39 PM on September 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

my climate change-denying dad's attitude: the world has always changed temperature throughout its history. This is just another one of those changes, nothing we can do.

This kind of complacent refusal to address the issue of how much the temperature has changed through which parts of history and how fast those changes have occurred compared to what's going on now is something I find completely infuriating.

It's the same kind of all-or-nothing thinking that leads people to decide not to get vaxxed on the grounds that getting vaxxed can't guarantee that you won't get the disease. This probably accounts for why it's so common to find anti-vaxxers who are also anthropogenic global warming deniers.

Fundamental innumeracy, and in particular its consequence of an almost complete lack of any realistic sense of proportion, is increasingly widespread and very very dangerous.
posted by flabdablet at 12:49 PM on September 22, 2022 [8 favorites]

in Canada our approach to reducing emissions is to double down on fossil fuel investment

Australia same same.

I've long believed that all the discourse around "emissions reduction" has been fundamentally misconceived. Climate change is driven not so much by what we're dumping into the atmosphere as where all the stuff we're dumping originated from.

For the last century and a bit we've been moving unimaginable quantities of carbon out of the planetary slow carbon cycle and transferring it into the fast carbon cycle, and that is what we need to stop doing as fast as humanly possible. It's not emissions per se that we need to cut back, it's the de-sequestering of fossil carbon (coal, oil, gas, limestone), and we need to be applying our economic disincentives not to the diffuse places where the transfers into the fast cycle are happening, but where the concentrations of transfers out of the slow cycle are.

Stop subsidizing the fossil fuel extraction industries and tax the fuck out of them instead. That ought to be public policy priority #1 for every government in the world. It isn't; instead, we all continue to fuck around with ways to rules-lawyer our national atmospheric emissions bookkeeping while studiously ignoring all our fossil carbon exports. Makes me sick to my stomach with impotent fury every time I think about it.
posted by flabdablet at 1:01 PM on September 22, 2022 [13 favorites]

And of course we need to fix the innumerable ways we're fucking with the fast cycle as well, notably through land clearing and deforestation and oceanic biodiversity destruction, but the simple fact is that plugging the leaks we've been hammering into the slow cycle is both more straightforward and more consequential.

We need to be doing both, but wherever there actually is some kind of zero-sum choice between fast-cycle modifications and from-slow-cycle transfers for whatever bizarre policy reason, shutting down the from-slow-cycle transfers is obviously the priority.
posted by flabdablet at 1:09 PM on September 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

The status quo will continue until the people in charge are made to feel pain. This truism scales infinitely from climate catastrophe to familial conflict. It remains to be seen if angry tweets will do the trick to fix capitalism's destruction of the ecosphere, but I expect it's going to be something more like how Jason on The Good Place's solves problems.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:27 PM on September 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

“Our data is actual human subject data and shows that the critical wet-bulb temperature is closer to 31.5°C”

In fact, ecosystem collapse caused by not wholly by climate share me worse than climate change. At least we kinda recognize floods and famines, but we do not even notice essential soil fungi, pollinators, etc. going extinct, which likely makes ecosystem collapse a high risk for human extinction.

Around the biotic pump work by Anastassia Makarieva and others (sciam), I've this conjecture that deserts were largely man made..

Scientists say humans may have triggered desertification of the Sahara

"The biotic pump keeps [South America] moist if for any reason it were to disappear tomorrow then in less than 10 years all the fresh water would drain into the ocean"

It's worse of course: The nine boundaries humanity must respect to keep the planet habitable
posted by jeffburdges at 4:14 PM on September 22, 2022 [10 favorites]

We had a hotter than usual summer here in Montana, and I was browsing some information describing the local climate which said we had an average of 15 days/year that were 90F or above.

I knew that we'd had way more than that this year, so, wondering just how atypical the year was, I downloaded 120+ years of temperature data from NOAA and looked at it myself. I found that the 15 days/year metric had been true back in the 1960s, but now it was closer to 30.

Plotting the number of 90+ days created a graph with a clearly increasing trendline. I also discovered that the high temperatures are starting sooner and staying later. Looking at all the 90+ days, only 17% occurred before 1963 with 83% after. Similarly, of all 90+ days in September, 78% occurred after 1963.

This showed both that average citizen can do limited analyses and also that thinking about average temperature was different that I originally considered. More hot days raises the average just as much as warmer individual days does.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 4:57 PM on September 22, 2022 [7 favorites]

we do not even notice essential soil fungi, pollinators, etc. going extinct, which likely makes ecosystem collapse a high risk for human extinction.

That right there is another widespread thought form that gives me hives: the idea that ecosystem collapse is a bad thing because it involves a risk of human extinction.

The way I see it, ecosystem collapse is an unfathomable tragedy in and of itself, the looming prospect of which should long have been enough to have stopped us from doing our collective best to bring on as much of it as possible.

To the extent that the threat of human extinction distresses me, it does so exactly because the only thing that could make it even remotely likely is the extinction of damn near everything else first.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just weird for identifying as a lifeform first and a human second. But the implied priority that we would be preserving anything of value if humans alone were somehow to remain capable of reproducing on (or off) a planet where we've killed everything else is a value I'd expect to see espoused by a mindless paperclip-maximizing AI, not any thinking feeling human community I want to live in. Or for.
posted by flabdablet at 7:46 PM on September 22, 2022 [4 favorites]

I feel an intense amount of existential dread, which I am largely able to keep at bay

the thing that I find so hard to understand is people who still have children..not in a "they are overpopulating the earth!" kind of way, but more like...it's such a statement of hope. where do they get that hope? that their children will even have an earth to inhabit? because I want some of that. I envy them, even if for many they're probably just choosing not to think much about it

someone above mentioned the pandemic...if anything the pandemic has showed how poorly civilization is equipped to deal with these sorts of problems. the pandemic is similar in nature to climate change, except significantly easier and more obvious in almost every way...and even then, we were completely incapable of managing it in a reasonable way, with many denying the problem even exists!
posted by wooh at 8:41 PM on September 22, 2022 [7 favorites]

Southern Arizona here. The summers have always been hot, and this summer is no exception. It’s not as brutal as 2020 (our hottest summer ever, it was brutal) and we’ve had a decent monsoon. The problem I’m seeing isn’t so much the upper limit, it’s the lower and side limits. What I mean by that is for the lower limit, it doesn’t seem to be cooling off as much as it used to overnight. We had a stretch of 99 days where we never got below 70 degrees, even with monsoon days. It’s late September and it should be cooling off more at night and yet we’re dropping only to the low to mid 70s. That overnight cooling is crucial. What I mean by the side limits is that it seems to be staying warmer longer into October and even November - we’ve had mid 90s for highs in November a few times over the last few years. It’s also heating up earlier. Mid-80s days in February are becoming commonplace. We dropped below freezing only a handful of days this past winter, and while it’s not the rule here it’s not uncommon to drop down into the 20s for several days every winter. I’ve been here over 40 years. Things just feel different.

Lots of people have solar here, which is great. There’s also a lot of utility scale solar fields, which is also great. The utility here has built a lot of wind power in New Mexico, which is also also great. But they’re also going out of their way to hamstring residential solar. We got in right before they cut off net metering and went to a cheaper export rate. They’re denying a lot of solar connection applications. Solar delivers a lot of power during the hottest parts of the day and we should be embracing that. The local power company gets the bulk of its power from natural gas. Money, as always, talks. We should be having a Manhattan Project type of effort to get off of fossil fuels, because the planet is on fire, but no, there’s money to be made.

Of course water is becoming a huge issue. It always has been but we can see the cliff from here now. The bulk of Arizona’s water usage is agricultural. The state has seven times the amount of people it did 50 years ago and uses slightly *less* water than it did then. Not per capita, total water usage. The population growth isn’t the issue. Farmers growing extremely water intensive crops in the hottest areas of the state is the big issue. What are we doing about it? Not much. There were some cuts agreed to by the Colorado river basin states, but Arizona is now rethinking that and considering taking their full allotment anyway because they don’t think California is giving up enough water. The feds have told the states, look, you better figure something out quick or we’re going to figure something out for you. Playing these “oh, we are ENTITLED to this water” game isn’t going to be fun in a few years if we don’t get an absolute fuckton of snow in the mountains feeding the river. Lakes Powell and Mead are both in danger of hitting dead pool within a few years. Powell may drop below minimum power pool *this winter.*. It bottomed out in March at 3522 feet, and minimum power pool is 3490. Full pool is 3700. Being almost 180 feet down is alarming enough, but the canyons that make up Powell are narrower at the bottom, so the lower it gets, the narrower that channel gets so it takes less water loss to drop the lake level. Powell is currently at 3529. It’s about 400 feet deep at the dam right now. Here’s the thing that should throw it into perspective, though - it’s down 170 feet and now 400 feet deep at the dam… but the lake is only 23% full. I kayaked Antelope Canyon in Lake Powell last month at 3535, about 70-80 feet down from the last time I did it, and the change was quite amazing. Here is a comparison, I took the first pic in 2017, the other last month. I have a couple others if I can find them.

It’s getting worse a lot faster than people think, at least that’s what it feels like to me. The bill for the climate is coming due and there’s gonna be a lot of interest added to that.
posted by azpenguin at 8:49 PM on September 22, 2022 [13 favorites]

the thing that I find so hard to understand is people who still have children

a) some people have an extremely strong biological drive to have them, against which logic is useless

b) don’t underestimate the human capacity for self -delusion and cognitive dissonance

c) someone has to to avoid an elective Children of Men scenario.

(In the first week back home with our newborn twins. So very tired)
posted by Jon Mitchell at 9:21 PM on September 22, 2022 [5 favorites]

(In the first week back home with our newborn twins. So very tired)

as someone who really likes children but will likely not have any, 1. congratulations! 2. I hope that they, and all children, inherit a world worthy of their hope and innocence
posted by wooh at 9:26 PM on September 22, 2022 [7 favorites]

But they’re also going out of their way to hamstring residential solar. We got in right before they cut off net metering and went to a cheaper export rate.

I'd like to offer some insight into this from Australia, we have the highest per capita uptake of solar PV in the world (well, a year or two at least) so I think we're ahead of the curve in dealing with the transition to green energy.

I don't see how net metering could work at all. Wholesale electricity prices are near zero or even negative at noon because there is so much solar running.

There is too much much power being supplied into the grid, which is dangerous - voltage will rise and will damage all connected appliances unless they do an emergency shut off and take the whole grid down. That's why wholesale prices turn negative - if someone doesn't soak up this excess power the grid will go down, so at this point we are desperately paying people to use power. And they do! Many steel casting plants deliberately schedule high volume production on days where energy prices are negative.

Unless prices reflect their true value, there are going to be awful mismatches in incentives for supply and consumption.

Wholesale passthrough (or time of day export pricing) would encourage people to put panels on an east / west facing because that more closely matches supply and consumption.

Net metering would encourage people to simply maximize total production in a North / South aspect (depending which hemisphere you are in) which would result in you producing power precisely at a time no one want your power, but which the utility is obliged to accept under net metering.

My house costs A$850,000 and the solar panels on it costs A$8,000 before subsidies, and I generate 50% more electricity than I consume in a year. And my house is pure electric - no fossil fuels for heating or cooling.

Literally for 1% of the cost of the house you are now a significant net contributor to the electrical grid.

There is a larger discussion at the grid level about how to handle the transition to renewables but at least at the consumer level, Australia's system (free market style) seems the most sustainable - expose consumers partially or fully to the real "wholesale" price of energy. Under net metering utilities will have a real headache on their hands trying to get rid of excess energy during the day, and if the law mandates net metering or prevents them controlling customers inverters then their only choice is to deny any further solar installation.
posted by xdvesper at 10:48 PM on September 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

Climate change is driven not so much by what we're dumping into the atmosphere as where all the stuff we're dumping originated from.

“Don’t fuck with the fossils”

- Rule #2 from “A Primer for Homesteaders Arriving on a New World”
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 4:51 AM on September 23, 2022

c) someone has to to avoid an elective Children of Men scenario.

I found that movie challenging specifically because of that assumption. As horrible as the prospect is, it is also the best possible ending, if it’s all going to end. And then a baby shows up. Inside, I was screaming goddamnit no we were so close
posted by notoriety public at 4:54 AM on September 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

Farmers growing extremely water intensive crops in the hottest areas of the state is the big issue.

I highly recommend Cadillac Desert. It was written in 1986, but everything he said then is even more true today. Farming the desert looked like a miracle, but is really a disaster.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:42 AM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mouse Lung Structure and Function after Long-Term Exposure to an Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Level Predicted by Climate Change Modeling

Regardless, these data suggest that moderate elevations in atmospheric CO2 cannot be dismissed as insignificant in terms of their direct effects on health. Our data provide the rationale for further exploration of this phenotype. Future research is needed to assess whether long-term exposure to moderately increased CO2 also negatively impacts other organs that have previously been shown to be impacted by short-term, high-level CO2 exposure (e.g., the brain, kidneys, and bones). It is our opinion that with atmospheric CO2 increasing 2–3 ppm/y, it will not be long until a level is reached that is directly detrimental to human health. Thus, continued research in this area and increased effort in curbing CO2 emissions are both urgently required.

posted by MrVisible at 7:04 AM on September 23, 2022 [3 favorites]

I heard recently that by the end of the century, temperatures in the tropics (home to 40% of human population) will be intolerable on most days of the year. [Heard this on Harry Shearer's Le Show 3 weeks ago.]
posted by neuron at 8:42 AM on September 23, 2022

> I don't see how net metering [for solar feed-in] could work at all. Wholesale electricity prices are near zero or even negative at noon because there is so much solar running.

> There is too much much power being supplied into the grid, which is dangerous - voltage will rise and will damage all connected appliances unless they do an emergency shut off and take the whole grid down. That's why wholesale prices turn negative - if someone doesn't soak up this excess power the grid will go down, so at this point we are desperately paying people to use power. And they do! Many steel casting plants deliberately schedule high volume production on days where energy prices are negative.

This is a solvable problem:

- if the voltage coming out of individual home inverters is properly regulated to a specified voltage, and the grid voltage happens to rise a tic above that, it's no longer possible to have a net transfer back into the grid (a lower voltage can't push energy into a higher voltage. EE stuff)
- it's possible to remotely control household inverters to gate feed-in: over the Internet, by specific times, and even by voltage cues as mentioned above

Also, given the wholesale situation, people and businesses will figure out how to use the "free" power when its available. And that's when grid batteries (or battery-like functions, like refilling water reservoirs for hydro generation, or splitting water to create hydrogen) are most economically recharged.

(oh, look at me, all optimistic today...)
posted by Artful Codger at 9:08 AM on September 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

"...technology..."
People love this because is absolves them of any responsibility

Maybe some, but if you're pointing at me, no not at all. We are here now, did I contribute by being a citizen of an advanced society? Yes as much as anyone here, I've driven cars, small generally, but can not afford an electric and they really did not exist for most of my life. So what do we do, it's cars/trucks/ships/factories that generate CO2, what happens if we just shut them all down? Genocide. Using paper or cloth bags for your groceries is no tipping the needle. Or even measurable even if everyone did it. So are you, pro genocide? But at this point, the momentum is in place, the increase of heat in the environment is happening no matter what ANYONE does.

The only option is new tech. None will be perfect, will not be distributed evenly. But observing what the real possibilities must be is not an abnegation of responsibility.

New battery tech, passive cooling tech, space umbrellas (not a joke) crisper to make more resilient species, who knows but I really do not know any other options as the heat train is rolling down an incline and it's not stopping even if civilization is shut down.
posted by sammyo at 9:15 AM on September 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

> Using paper or cloth bags for your groceries is no tipping the needle. Or even measurable even if everyone did it.

Eliminating single-use non-degradable/not recyclable plastics wherever we can will be huge... for the problem of plastic pollution. Absolutely measurable.

Yes "new tech" in the form of better more sustainable energy sources, processes and materials is essential... but you don't seem to have seen through to the central problem behind all of our most pressing environmental issues: consuming too much.

We won't solve that much by replacing every gas car with an EV; we need less cars. Like fossil fuels, many other resources are finite and will run out sooner if we don't use them more judiciously. We need to use and reuse stuff more thoughtfully, period.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:57 PM on September 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

Idiocracy remake plot idea: Adults might only feel discomfort, mild headaches, etc. from high CO2, although actually long-term maybe bad too, based upon MrVisible's link. Yet children might respond by learning less advanced material, so at some level our technologically advanced society simply fails.

"The fraction of carbon dioxide [we breathe] just crossed 400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating current trends suggest 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration .. human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.” — David Wallace-Wells

We're even reducing cognition purely by virtue of the excess heat, never mind mental health and other pollutants.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:01 PM on September 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Another point to ponder is that most people in industrialized nations spend most of our time indoors, and indoor CO₂ levels have been regularly exceeding 1000ppm since the advent of whole-building HVAC.
posted by flabdablet at 7:05 AM on September 25, 2022

Yes exactly, any health problems caused by outdoor CO2 levels this century should be less problematic than whatever westerners do to themselves already, but indoor CO2 levels run double or triple outdoor levels.

I'd expect outdoors becomes less popular once climate change destroys our ozone layer too.
posted by jeffburdges at 10:49 AM on September 29, 2022