The Long Way Back to Ourselves

7.10

The Great Acceleration

This episode opens on a mountain in the Pacific in March 1958, where chemist Charles David Keeling began measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide at roughly 315 parts per million, a reading now above 420. A 2015 compilation of twenty-four measurements by Will Steffen's group found them all bending sharply upward around 1950; the episode tests if that is a real pattern or a record-keeping artifact. It traces the outsized role of Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch's nitrogen-fixation process, which today supplies an estimated forty to fifty percent of the nitrogen in human protein worldwide. The episode closes by refusing to tally the century's harms against its gains: a murdered person and a vaccinated child share no common unit for comparison.