You should make the opposite conclusion. The fact that atoms are so tiny that almost every notable event has a detectable affect on isotope ratios means you should downgrade the meaningfulness of the OP article. (See my other comment on ancient lead, which has nothing to do with nuclear tech.) Likewise, when seizmic technology improves and we can sense explosions from further away, we don't conclude that building demolition is somehow more important than we previously thought.

Yeah, a similar observation is that there are more atoms in a glass of water than glasses of water in all the oceans. So, dumping a glass of (somehow trackable) water into the ocean would eventually cause every glass of water to contain atoms from that glass. See also: http://samkean.com/books/caesars-last-breath/

Or it takes 10 years for one of your breaths to be spread around the atmosphere, and everyone is very likely to be breathing at least one molecule of that breath in every breath they take.

From article "Breathing Everyone's Air" - scroll down to that heading in http://www.scifun.ed.ac.uk/card/facts.html

Take a look at this friendly graph of carbon-14 concentration in the atmosphere since 1955 for just one example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-14#/media/File%3ARadi...

Just note that this friendly graph employs the bad practice of not having the vertical axis origin at 0, which visually exaggerates the change.

I disagree. It's a multiplicative factor vertically centered to 1. Seems better to me than if it had been aligned to 0.

Not necessarily a bad practice. Most of the graphs I've seen use this technique, do so to make the changes in value visible, not to deceive the viewer.

If the change is invisible on a 0-based graph, maybe the change isn’t so important....

This one only exaggerates things by a factor of 2, at least.

Doubling is pretty significant, as is the rate of increase prior to, and dropoff after, 1963.

If some sort of catastrophe befalls our current civilization and future archaeologists attempt to C14 date our fossils and artifacts derived from carbon sequestered during this era, their results will be wildly unreliable.

There are many important changes that are hard to see on a 0-based graph.

If you plot human body temperature in Kelvins, the difference between someone with hypothermia and someone with a raging fever are relatively slight (under 2%).

0 is only relevant for linear utility/impact functions The effect of an isotope isn't necessarily linear in its magnitude from 0. The baseline should be something that matters, like maximum safe dose.

If you have a baseline and a scale that indicates an actual effect, then by all means use it. That’s not the case here, nor has it been the case for any other such graph I can remember seeing. Universally, the bottom is chosen as the minimum value in the data being plotted.

Climate change is significant, even though I'm certain that temperature charted against 0 Kelvin isn't too visible.

Zero can be just as arbitrary a starting point as non-zero.

The cosmic microwave background is invisible on a 0-based image.

Only if you’re trying to show the CMB and galaxies in the same image. Since doing so would be misleading as to the brightness of the CMB, that seems like a feature, not a bug.

No, if you insist on a uniform colormap that includes 0K (or whatever measurement you're showing the CMB with) then there's absolutely no way to make the CMB visible. The average temperature is 2.72548 K with variations on the order of 0.00057 K. Its incredible uniformity is one of its more important features.

Oh, you meant variations in the CMB. I thought you just meant making the CMB visible.

That's just it: if the changes are only visible if you chop off the bottom of the graph, the probability they aren't significant increases.

How would you feel if your body temperature increased 3%? Barely visible in a 0-based graph.

What is a 3% change in body temperature? From absolute zero?

(My point is that temperature is probably an odd man out in graph terms, our usual reference points are not actually at zero.)

Check out Caesar's Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us by Sam Kean.

Far less interesting a read, an article about how many molecules of Beyonce's breath you inhale with each breath. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/12/beyonce-breath_n_6...

A paleontologist friend of mine often quips that in his field, everything from the 1950s onward is considered “present date”, because the additional radiation pretty much ruined any chance of accurate carbon dating after the atmospheric testing era.

Granted, paleontology looks back in the span of millions to billions of years, so those ancient fossils are ok, but I imagine future scientists will grind their teeth an awful lot when trying to make scientific sense of our present day.

Maybe they’ll love having a really obvious marker that they can definitively date to almost the exact year.

Merely by breathing for a year, everyone in the world inhales a measureable amount of radiation from atmospheric tests performed in the 1950s.

check out this graph of radioactive cesium in mother's milk

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130403200836/htt...

Chernobyl is just a tiny blip.

Just about every living thing that has lived since 1945 has had tracers of the atomic age within its body, in the form of isotopes that were far less common, prior to atmospheric nuclear tests.

Another chemical effect of the modern age:

Before the industrial revolution, silver did not tarnish. Burning coal introduced enough sulfur in the air that silver started tarnishing.

This struck me as very surprising. Straight Dope's take[1]:

> While coal-burning power plants are responsible for producing most of the sulfur dioxide out there (and thus acid rain), they don’t contribute that much of the compounds that actually cause silver to tarnish, namely hydrogen sulfide—best known as a key player in the smell of rotten eggs and flatulence—and the similarly pungent carbonyl sulfide. About 90 percent of the hydrogen sulfide and more than two-thirds of the carbonyl sulfide in our atmosphere come from (you guessed it) volcanoes, salt marshland, undersea vents, and other natural sources.

[1] https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/straight-dope/ar...

> more than two-thirds of the carbonyl sulfide in our atmosphere come from (you guessed it)

And here I thought they were going to say rotten eggs and flatulence...