I stumbled across this one and I'll say the title grabbed me: "I Bought a CO2 Monitor, and It Broke Me" and then the sub title: "I thought I could fix the air quality in my apartment. I was wrong." (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/i-bought-a-co2-monitor-and-it-broke-me)
I'm guessing The Atlantic is a left leaning paper but it still left me wondering: are all Climate Changers this thoughtless and/or gullible? You'll find out like I did, that some people out there would rather not eat or stay warm because of a Carbon Dioxide measurement in their living space. No, it doesn't make sense to me either but that was enough to make a Blog entry out of.
This doozy was written by Katherine J. Wu, a staff writer at The Atlantic. She must get paid by the word because it really didn't have to be this... fluffy. Here's an example:
"In 2023 a three-inch square of plastic and metal began, slowly and steadily, to upend my life.
"The culprit was my new portable carbon-dioxide monitor, a device that had been sitting in my Amazon cart for months. I’d first eyed the product around the height of the coronavirus pandemic, figuring it could help me identify unventilated public spaces where exhaled breath was left to linger and the risk for virus transmission was high. But I didn’t shell out the $250 until January 2023, when a different set of worries, over the health risks of gas stoves and indoorair pollution, reached a boiling point. It was as good a time as any to get savvy to the air in my home."
Whereas I would have said something like: "I must have added a CO2 monitor to my Amazon cart sometime around COVID, so I thought I'd buy it now and try it out." And then maybe a, "It wasn't what I was expecting..."
I'm not sure how a Carbon Dioxide monitor would lead to cleaner air. It's just a gauge. A Carbon Monoxide monitor is at least useful; it'll notify you that you're about to die, just as you're passing out, but a home Carbon Dioxide meter just seems like a dumb thing to buy. I have a digital thermometer/barometer that hangs on my wall. It measures the air pressure, outdoor temperature, indoor temperature and tries to do a little forecast. Never once did I ever expect my thermometer to make it not rain on a day I had an outdoor event to go to.
"I knew from the get-go that the small, stuffy apartment in which I work remotely was bound to be an air-quality disaster. But with the help of my shiny Aranet4, the brand most indoor-air experts seem to swear by, I was sure to fix the place up. When carbon-dioxide levels increased, I’d crack a window; when I cooked on my gas stove, I’d run the range fan. What could be easier? It would basically be like living outside, with better Wi-Fi. This year, spring cleaning would be a literal breeze!"
I don't know about you, but a literal breeze doesn't clean anything for me. And as wordy as she has been so far, she forgot to mention that the "shiny Aranet4" is the brand of the CO2 tester. She should have mentioned that so I didn't have to go look it up.
"The illusion was shattered minutes after I popped the batteries into my new device. At baseline, the levels in my apartment were already dancing around 1,200 parts per million (ppm)—a concentration that, as the device’s user manual informed me, was cutting my brain’s cognitive function by 15 percent. Aghast, I flung open a window, letting in a blast of frigid New England air. Two hours later, as I shivered in my 48-degree-Fahrenheit apartment in a coat, ski pants, and wool socks, typing numbly on my icy keyboard, the Aranet still hadn’t budged below 1,000 ppm, a common safetythreshold for many experts. By the evening, I’d given up on trying to hypothermia my way to clean air. But as I tried to sleep in the suffocating trap of noxious gas that I had once called my home, next to the reeking sack of respiring flesh I had once called my spouse, the Aranet let loose an ominous beep: The ppm had climbed back up, this time to above 1,400. My cognitive capacity was now down 50 percent, per the user manual, on account of self-poisoning with stagnant air."
I feel so bad for the person that has to live her. 1200 parts per million is 0.0012, or 0.12%, is statistically a 0. Somehow I don't think it was the ppm reading that was cutting her brain's cognitive functions. I'll bet those functions were long gone before she ever bought a CO2 meter. Where did she get these delusional ideas? Probably from the Aranet FAQ (https://pro.aranet.com/faq/) where they'll state things like "Additionally, CO2 monitoring helps to prevent the spread of COVID-19, as CO2 level is a good proxy for COVID-19 infection risk". I'm not sure who's dumber, her or Aranet. I guess her since she fell for the bullshit.
"By the next morning, I was in despair. This was not the reality I had imagined when I decided to invite the Aranet4 into my home. I had envisioned the device and myself as a team with a shared goal: clean, clean air for all! But it was becoming clear that I didn’t have the power to make the device happy. And that was making me miserable."
I don't know anyone who has a weird, subordinate attachment to an inanimate object like this one.
Eight more obnoxious paragraphs to go but I won't put you through all that.
"... my apartment’s air quality has a lot working against it: two humans and two cats, all of us with an annoying penchant for breathing, crammed into 1,000 square feet; a gas stove with no outside-venting hood; a kitchen window that opens directly above a parking lot. Even so, I was flabbergasted by just how difficult it was to bring down the CO2 levels around me. Over several weeks, the best indoor reading I sustained, after keeping my window open for six hours, abstaining from cooking, and running my range fan nonstop, was in the 800s. I wondered, briefly, if my neighborhood just had terrible outdoor air quality—or if my device was broken. Within minutes of my bringing the meter outside, however, it displayed a chill 480."
CO2's not going to kill you. Ask any hyperventilating person. Even they calm down once they've had enough.
And 1000 square feet is a pretty good size place, so I don't know what she's complaining about. But yeah, open the windows, don't eat, and run your range fan non-stop; enjoy your next hydro bill.
Which leads to this being a real life example of Net Zero being a scam. You'll never get to zero CO2 in the air because it's impossible. The pro Net Zero advocates know that too but they get to make money off the scare tactics like this example of getting people to buy a home CO2 monitor. There's still the question of why would we want to have zero CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place? What's the benefit? Aliens have been telling this for over a century now: "Human: Carbon based life form; 90% water". It can't be that bad.
"The meter’s cruel readings began to haunt me. Each upward tick raised my anxiety; I started to dread what I’d learn each morning when I woke up. After watching the Aranet4 flash figures in the high 2,000s when I briefly ignited my gas stove, I miserably deleted 10 wok-stir-fry recipes I’d bookmarked the month before. At least once, I told my husband to cool it with the whole “needing oxygen” thing, lest I upgrade to a more climate-friendly Plant Spouse. (I’m pretty sure I was joking, but I lacked the cognitive capacity to tell.) In more lucid moments, I understood the deeper meaning of the monitor: It was a symbol of my helplessness. I’d known I couldn’t personally clean the air at my favorite restaurant, or the post office, or my local Trader Joe’s. Now I realized that the issues in my home weren’t much more fixable. The device offered evidence of a problem, but not the means to solve it."
Shit, don't go to a movie theater. I think the key word she used here was "anxiety" (and I don't think she would know how to joke) but she has 99 problems and a gauge ain't one. Although I was deeply saddened to read that she had deleted, not 9, but 10 wok stir fry recipes, I'm thinking if she wasn't worried about CO2, she would be worrying about some other thing that someone else told her to worry about. She makes for a good victim in any circumstance. "I understood the deeper meaning of the monitor: It was a symbol of my helplessness." She should have bought the HU3000 Hang Up Meter, with an extended warranty.
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| The HU3000 Hang Up Meter |
"Many Americans face much greater challenges than mine. I am not among the millions living in a city with dangerous levels of particulate matter in the air, spewed out by industrial plants, gas-powered vehicles, and wildfires, for whom an open window could risk additional peril; I don’t have to be in a crowded office or a school with poor ventilation. Since the first year of the pandemic—and even before—experts have been calling for policy changes and infrastructural overhauls that would slash indoor air pollution for large sectors of the population at once. But as concern over COVID has faded, “people have moved on,” Marr (Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech) told me. Individuals are left on their own in the largely futile fight against stale air."
Paranoy much? It is a mental illness, after all. It's just like the people that haven't moved on from the plandemic. You'll still see them in the wild; the losers still wearing masks in their cars or apartment hallways. It's the same people that think wildfires are caused by "climate change" and not the people that were actually arrested for starting the fires. Most people have moved on from COVID because they realized they were duped, embarrassed about it and would rather not go through that whole mess again.
But it ends on a happy note:
"I’m now aiming for my own middle ground. Earlier this week, I dreamed of trying and failing to open a stuck window, and woke up in a cold sweat. I spent that day working with my (real-life) kitchen window cracked, but I shut it when the apartment got too chilly. More important, I placed my Aranet4 in a drawer, and didn’t pull it out again until nightfall. When my spouse came home, he marveled that our apartment, once again, felt warm."
That was one hell of a read. Unfortunately for me, I had to read it more than once to do this blog entry. I guess this was a peek into the mind of someone that isn't completely stable, totally gullible, overly dramatic and just buys into the current fear-du-jour. Not wife material.
What's not surprising after reading this whole thing, and the title being, "I Bought a CO2 Monitor, and It Broke Me. I thought I could fix the air quality in my apartment. I was wrong.", there wasn't one mention of anyone buying or suggesting buying an air purifier. Millions of people, including myself, own one. They're great. But she went out and bought an expensive gauge. Some people just make their own misery. Just don't tell her Brita uses carbon pellets in their filters.
