Anthropogenic activities are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. There is mounting experimental evidence that lifetime exposur

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[–] fristislurper@piefed.social 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I see this sentiment quite often, is it field-specific? Cause in physics and chemistry, starting at 0 is really not required...

In this case, the zero value is really not relevant (since no-one would ever have it anyway). It would just hide the signifcant drift over time. A good scaling here would be based on some clinically relevant interval I guess.

[–] matsdis@piefed.social 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I agree that showing the zero level may be useful here, but... I cannot find a scientific source that shows it differently, so it's not intentionally misleading at least. The bigger issue IMO is that it doesn't show enough historic context (ice core data). The original article has it, or nature.org or co2science.org (though it doesn't show the latest measurements).