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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to live in isolated sealed compounds that protect us from all that carbon? Can we build filtration systems?

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The gases being released aren't toxic until a hundred times higher than current levels. Filtering out methane and CO₂ is routine for life-support systems in submarines, spacecraft, and, yes, bunkers, so it's not infeasible. The problem is that they cause global warming, not toxicity, and we can't build an isolated sealed compound to protect the planet from them.

> The gases being released aren't toxic until a hundred times higher than current levels.

You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.

Current atmospheric CO2 level is 400ppm which already has a measurable impact on performance on tasks (compared to 250ppm couple decades ago).

Increasing it to just 1000ppm further degrades performance. And 2500ppm makes it difficult to concentrate on anything complex.

Even slight increase in concentration could lead to drastic changes over time when you consider everybody gets a little dumber.

https://skepticalscience.com/how-sapiens-in-the-world-of-hig...

EDIT: kragen, I am being throttled so here is my response to your below comment:

When there is plenty arguments and scientific consensus to the contrary, and the person presents numbers obviously derived from thin air, I think it is fair to state the person does not know what they are talking about.

Toxicology is a complex topic. But it is safe to say CO2 becomes toxic way before it becomes lethal. Which is to say you see adverse effects even before the concentration reaches lethal level. It may maybe take hundreds of times before it becomes immediately lethal but it is already toxic at about current concentration or 2-5 times current concentration, depending on who you ask, and not "hundreds of times" higher.

It's true that high CO₂ levels cause cognitive impairment, but submarines routinely operate for months in the 2000–5000 ppm range, sometimes as high as 13000 ppm, over 30 times higher than the current atmospheric level but still too low to kill people by about a factor of 8. Subtle cognitive impairments at these levels have been found by some researchers, while others have been unable to replicate them even at 30000 ppm: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29789085/ https://www.nap.edu/read/11170/chapter/5#54

That's why the NOAEL is set at 25000 ppm, at which point CO₂ starts to cause visual disturbances, which I think fall short of "toxicity"; it's more like a recreational drug effect. If the Earth's atmosphere reached 100 times the current level, 40000 ppm CO₂ (4%!), you still wouldn't have a CO₂ toxicity problem in humans. However, you probably wouldn't have a biosphere much longer either, and at that point toxicity to humans would be a moot point.

Also, by the way, the quality of the discussion would probably be significantly improved without you saying, "You obviously have no idea what you are talking about." Sometimes people might disagree with you because they know things you don't, for example because their information doesn't come from science popularizers, rather than because they don't know things you do. If you don't keep that in mind, you are likely to embarrass yourself frequently. Believe me, I have a lot of experience doing that.

Less sneering, please.

> "the quality of the discussion would probably be significantly improved without you saying, "You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.""

Amen.

As a casual observer trying to follow the conversation and learn more, I would prefer to hear just the facts with the data to support it, rather than the personal attacks regardless of whether you think they’re fair or not.

As a casual observer I would prefer if people checked the "facts" they post on HN.

It is now socially more acceptable to post obvious falsehoods than to point it out. Think about it.

Start checking the facts instead of first posting obvious falsehoods and then attacking other people for pointing out the falsehoods, then.

As a casual observer of casual observers, it bothers me when I see people more concerned with how someone said something then what they said.

This flaw in human comprehension is responsible for a lot of what’s wrong with our society.

I’m not tone policing if that’s what you’re suggesting. If that is indeed what you’re suggesting, then the failure in comprehension is your own.

My criticism is not about how something was said. My criticism is specifically about what was said, in that I found it irrelevant.

I’d like to learn more about the topic, but I can’t learn anything about the topic from personal judgements made about an interlocutor. It’s just noise and detracts from the argument being made.

1000ppm is quite normal indoors. My office is 800ppm right now.

It will take probably 100 years to get to 1000ppm.

Filtering carbon dioxide to have breathing air at home isn't difficult. But housing 8 billion people in sealed environment is.

The trouble with CO2 is that already the amount of it in atmosphere starts making us measurably dumber and it is only going to get worse.

1000ppm is a badly ventilated room that causes headache and poor performance on tasks. Imagine experiencing this for your entire life. Imagine ALL kids having trouble with concentration, entire Earth's population getting dumber. As if we did not have problems already...

What if we consider the sealed environment "the earth"?

Removing CO2 from atmosphere is still much, much more expensive than alternatives. People just don't seem to understand the vastness of our atmosphere and the scale of operations that would be needed for this.

Our atmosphere weighs ~5 quadrillion (5x10^15) tonnes. We are talking about an apparatus that can suck that amount of gas and process it to remove CO2 that is already very dilute.

If only we could invent some kind of living organisms which consume CO2 and emit oxygen! (Sorry, it’s a little snarky!)

I’m all seriousness, earth seems to find a balance when it goes through these types of events. Whether we’ll make it through the ride is to be seen.

You are right, Earth does have mechanisms through which it regulates the CO2 and tries to bring it back to "balance". But it is important to note that these mechanics (e.g. increased in weathering) take 10s-100s of thousands of years to take effect.

There are faster, more responsive mechanism that actually saved us from most of the problem for past decades. CO2 gets dissolved in ocean water very efficiently causing acidification and getting into other reactions.

Unfortunately, it seems oceans are loosing their ability to buffer CO2 and this may cause sharper increase in atmospheric CO2.

The earth doesn’t “regulate” CO2. CO2 levels have been much higher in the past. There are natural process which just happen to capture or release CO2, but there is no “right” level of CO2.

The sarcasm is fine, but I have no sense of whether or not the point is even valid. Do you have any back of the napkin maths to illustrate how effective covering the Earth’s land masses in trees would be, even if we could terraform all the big deserts? Planting a load of trees is at least actionable, but I wonder if it’s also futile.

Phytoplankton is what makes oxygen from CO2. Trees actually do not add much. IMO we should bioengineer phytoplankton to allow it to grow faster, so our oceans will just turn more CO2 into O2 and solve that issue.

... and in the process destabilize every other ecosystem in the ocean? I think that's a dangerous direction to go into without further insights into what kind unintended consequences there might be.

I still have no sense of how feasible or efficacious that might be.

Well, the carboniferous era would disagree with you :)

> Trees actually do not add much

Keywords: Plumes; Oceanography.

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