February 2026 Atmospheric CO2 Content 429.35 ppm; February 2025 427.09 ppm; February 2024 424.55 ppm

[hatrack]

https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2/co2_mm_mlo.txt

[-misanthroptimist]

1. I'm so old...

...that I remember when atmospheric CO2 was under 300ppm.

[hatrack]

2. And after this year, we'll never see 430 ppm or lower again . . .

. . . by which I mean any of our species.

[-misanthroptimist]

3. While I think CC will kill billions of people...

...I think that our species will survive. We are very clever individually and in small groups. If Earth can sustain life, there will be people who figure out how to survive, imo. It may not be many and they may be (almost certainly will be) miserable, they'll survive.

[hatrack]

5. True, in that we're a pretty weedy species . . .

That said, not sure that people in 2150 or 2300 will be doing much work on tracking atmospheric trace gases, or will even remember how that works.

[surfered]

4. It was about 310 in 1958 according to data from Mauna Loa

[hatrack]

6. And every ppm represents 2.13 billion tons of CO2 . . .

And the last pound of each ton we emit won't be absorbed by natural systems for +/- 25,000 years - data points that seem to get, uh, overlooked, in press release "news" about "carbon sequestration" and "direct air capture".

[surfered]

7. We're toast!