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!).
Maybe it's obvious to you already but I was perplexed. What did the author mean by this? Well, ppm is parts per million of course. Of what? Carbon? A little sleuthing made it clear this is exactly what they were talking about.
But we normally talk about when something was made we use time like. Time. You know... hours, minutes, jiffies. Not parts of a molecule in the atmosphere. I thought to myself, "if you wanted to measure time using the number of molecules in the atmosphere it would have to increase in quantity in a truly monotonic fashion (always increasing, never decreasing or staying the same) for decades in order to be useful". Oh. Yeah, that sounds like my boy carbon. Now, this isn't 100% mathematically monotonic for all living humans' lives, but it's reeaaaallly close! Of course, the side effect of this is that (mostly) everyone can uniquely map their birth year to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
If it's not clear by implication I think this is a great demonstration of how dire things are with respect to the environment. If CO2 has increased so fast, so consistently, for the entirety of most living human beings' lives... that is a remarkable! I think this is sort of obvious when you think about it but hard to remember. Remembering the CO2 ppm when you were born 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 450ppm" 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 but for high level goals this could be a good memento mori.
Dating things by CO2 ppm also has the benefit of sounding really cool like something out of 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.