From the book
The Ground Under the Cave
The rest of the dashboard
The richest country in the history of the species, and its citizens die younger than those of every peer nation that spends half as much. The planet’s feedback loop and the dragon’s clench run on the same design. Chapter 22 keeps the permafrost, the methane, the loop and the Atlantic current; here are the other gauges.
Supports Chapter 22, “The Dragon We Made Burns Us All.” The printed book points here for the detail it no longer carries.
Air and ice
| Gauge | Reading | In the printed book |
|---|---|---|
| Carbon dioxide | Fifty percent above pre-industrial levels, and climbing at a rate the ice cores have not seen in eight hundred thousand years | Higher than anything in eight hundred thousand years |
| Methane | Eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year window | Kept |
| Mongolia’s permafrost | Sixty-three percent of the country underlain in the 1970s; twenty-nine percent today | Kept |
| The permafrost region | NASA’s survey of 2000 to 2020 confirmed it is already a net contributor to global warming: methane from its lakes and wetlands tips the Arctic carbon balance into a source rather than a sink, and the ground releases gas year-round, even in winter | Net contributor, year-round |
| The Atlantic current | One study puts the probability that its collapse is already locked in, unavoidable even if warming stopped today, at ten to twenty-three percent. Iceland has classified it as a national security threat | May already be locked in |
A feedback loop (warming thaws permafrost, permafrost releases methane, methane warms) that no amount of human behavioral change can reverse once it starts, and it has started.
Packaging
| Gauge | Reading | In the printed book |
|---|---|---|
| Plastic in the ocean | Hundreds of millions of metric tons, a garbage truck’s worth entering every minute | Moved here |
| Microplastics in people | Found in human blood, human lungs, human placentas: every placenta tested in 2024 came back positive | Blood, lungs, placentas |
Every child born today arrives pre-loaded with a century of packaging. The pollution is no longer around us. It is us.
The body
| Gauge | Reading | In the printed book |
|---|---|---|
| American life expectancy | Fell three consecutive years beginning in 2015, before the pandemic: deaths of despair, opioids, alcohol, suicide | Kept |
| The pandemic | Dropped it a further two and a half years in two seasons | Moved here |
| Obesity | Two in five American adults clinically obese | Moved here |
| Infant and maternal mortality | The highest of any developed country on the planet | Moved here |
Checking in progress. These readings are the book’s as they stood in the 25b edition. A project review (2026-09-23) asked that the Chapter 22 climate figures, the Mongolia permafrost shares and the ten to twenty-three percent estimate among them, carry citations, since Chapter 25 says they need none; the citations are being added to this page.