If you go back in time a ways, there were numbers given out about what percentages of our atmosphere were Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide, Helium, Argon, etc. I seem to recall that O2 was around 20%. Notice that I'm not Googling it though that function is a few keystrokes away. It was just an easy, nice round number to remember. Nitrogen is the highest by far, but our lungs do a great job of filtering it out when we breathe so we can take in O2. But you know all this, right? Maybe not the exact numbers, but the big picture. We take in O2, breathe out CO2, then plants take in CO2 and breathe out O2. It's one reason why we need them in order to survive. Food, shade, and shelter are others. They also contribute beauty, for a different kind of survival.
Other ways of measuring what is in our air become important in places like work environments where many chemicals become dangerous in certain concentrations. We get stuck in those locations for hours, repeated over days/weeks/years. OSHA will have lists of all kinds of chemicals and what is/isn't safe to breathe. Those numbers in the danger zones are in PPM, or parts per million, or when they're even more dangerous, PPB, parts per billion. You get the same measurements in the water we drink, where the tiniest amount of certain molecules can do untold damage to us. If we're on municipal water systems, we get annual reports on how many PPM of arsenic or lead, for examples, are in what we drink, cook with, and bathe in. Read the next one before you toss it away.
For those who have been paying attention, CO2 and methane amounts in our atmosphere are beginning to cause problems. We're heating up. Ice is melting. Each new measurement is worse than the last. The whole process is accelerating, and numerous tipping points, the places where we can no longer stop it, have been reached. Since heat is energy, and the atmosphere is heating up, weather is getting more energy. Simple physics. Simple math. As little as five years ago we kept hearing "We can't blame X event on global warming, it's just an isolated weather event." But they keep getting worse, stronger and more frequent, and temperatures keep rising. And rising. And rise off the charts. It is global warming.
Now I did inquire of Professor Google about these next numbers. Where are carbon dioxide levels now, and where did they used to be? Back before the industrial age, before when we started pouring all that smoke into the air, filled with carbon from burning oil, gas, coal, wood, and whatever, CO2 levels were measured at around 280 PPM. We just passed 424 PPM.
Take that in for a minute.
It's still climbing. We're not acting to stop it.
If we get too much CO2 in the air we breathe, things happen. We're not there yet, or not so we notice the changes, or even if we do we blame them on other things. We get sluggish, tired, have persistent headaches. We become disoriented, paranoid, depressed. A whole lot of that translates to simply becoming more stupid. Nevermind your starting point, too much CO2 makes you more stupid than you were.
So the race is on. There are big problems to solve... if we can. We need our best and brightest working on them. Meanwhile CO2 is still increasing. Methane, which is even worse for the planet, is increasing even faster, after having been trapped beneath frozen layers of the planet for millennia. At what point do we all become too stupid to fix any of them?
Will we be too stupid by then to even notice?
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