How Recent Is Our CO₂ Growth?

Loading interactive Python…

When people talk about climate change, they often frame it as something that started “with the industrial revolution.” And while that’s qualitatively true, the data tells a sharper, more surprising story:

Most of the anthropogenic CO₂ rise happened not in the 19th century, but in living memory.

Was It Our Ancestors?

If you were born before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, you might assume that your ancestors were mainly to blame for the climate crisis. But the data tells a different story:

The Real Acceleration Point

Global CO₂ levels did rise slowly after the start of industrialisation. But they really took off after World War II, when fossil fuel use exploded in scale.

The Keeling Curve, measured since 1958 at Mauna Loa, makes this visible: not just steady growth, but accelerating growth.

Your Lifetime in Data

We’ve built an interactive tool that lets you type in your date of birth (or any other date that matters to you). It will instantly tell you how much of the anthropogenic CO₂ rise has happened since that date.

For the authors of this post, the answers are:

How about you? Try it out here.

The graph automatically updates every time new CO₂ data is released from Mauna Loa. So check back regularly to see how the percentages change.

Why We Do This

At DataStrategies4Change (DS4C), we believe that data becomes powerful when it creates insight. Looking at familiar data in new ways helps us understand the present, challenge assumptions, and act strategically.

Methodology

We compare current atmospheric CO₂ levels with pre-industrial baselines (~280ppm).

To make our calculations, we combine two complementary datasets: the Mauna Loa CO₂ record and the Law Dome ice core record. The Mauna Loa data consists of continuous, high-precision atmospheric CO₂ measurements taken since 1958 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, providing a modern benchmark for greenhouse gas levels. The Law Dome dataset comes from air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice cores (66°44′S, 112°50′E), which preserve past atmospheric CO₂ concentrations over the last two millennia. Together, these datasets offer a continuous view of CO₂ levels from the pre-industrial era to the present.

Before analysis, we applied basic preprocessing steps, including linear interpolation to fill gaps and smoothing to reduce short-term variability. Download links for both the raw and preprocessed versions of the datasets are provided below.