CO2BN
I was "Suring the Web" when I came across a blog with a pithy about me finalized by one line: "made at 360ppm". Give or take a few I don't recall exactly the number and I have forgotten the blog (if I remember I'll update this section!).
But what did the author mean by this? Well, ppm is parts per million of course. Of what? Carbon? Well, a little sleuthing makes it clear this is exactly what they were talking about and it reveals this person was born sometime in the early 90's. I thought to myself, "wow, if CO2 has been increasing in such a monotonic fashion could everyone alive directly map their birth year to the ppm in the atmosphere?". To which the answer is yes (mostly).
If it's not clear by implication this is such a strong demonstration of how dire things are with respect to the environment. If CO2 has increased so fast, so consistently (save a few years), for the entirety of most living human beings' lives... that is a remarkable demonstration of the problem! I think this is sort of obvious when you think about it but hard to remember. But by uniquely marking your birth year to the ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere it makes it easy to remember!
One notable feature of this calendar system is that it seems to only be useful for the recent past. However, it can be useful for the future if you're trying to plan goals with respect to helping the environment. For example, "Our cleanup efforts need to be in place and scaled up nationally by 390ppm" frames your goal not in terms of business cycles but in terms of the real oppositional force. Maybe this isn't very practical for setting meetings and such but for high level goals at companies doing carbon capture or solar panel installations this could be a good memento mori.
Dating things by CO2 ppm also has the benefit of being a cool-sounding calendar system that would belong in something like Blade Runner.
As it turns out, my parasocial blogging friend and I were not discovering some new, secret calendar system. This was so well known that it was published by Forbes alongside a cute acronym "CO2BN" in 2022 (3 years ago). Well, if you can't beat 'em join 'em!
The last thing I'll leave you with is that the only way this calendar system stops working is if we actually succeed at reducing emissions and remediating the environment. In which case I will rejoice and throw this dumb metric in the trash. Until then
Made at 366ppm.