BENT
Central Hypothesis
“A long series measured the same way for decades settles what argument cannot, so the finding is never the latest value; it is the shape, the bend, and whether the bend is in the world or in the method.”
Global annual mean atmospheric CO2 rose from 419.3 ppm in 2023 to 425.6 ppm in 2025, including a 3.4 ppm jump in 2024 that tied the record for the largest annual increase since the 1960s; the maintained global series has not yet shown a plateau.
Cumulative global mean sea level change from satellite altimetry. The concerning quantity is the second derivative: the rate of rise itself has been increasing, which is a different claim from the level being higher.
The canonical technology cost curve: a fall steeper than semiconductor scaling over the same period, driven by a platform change rather than by incremental improvement.
Installed cost or levelised cost of electricity for utility-scale solar and battery storage, the clearest live example of a learning curve where each doubling of deployment produces a predictable cost fall.
Compute used to train the largest reported models, a curve growing far faster than the hardware efficiency underneath it, which is why the constraint is shifting to power and capital rather than chips.
General government debt against output, the series that determines how much room states have to respond to the next shock, and the one most often quoted without its denominator.
Births per woman, falling faster than successive official projections expected. The interesting part is not the level but the repeated forecast failure, which is a warning about extrapolating any curve on this page.
Resistance prevalence in surveillance data for a named pathogen and drug. A slow curve with a hard consequence: it removes treatments that made ordinary surgery survivable.
Arctic September minimum extent rose from 4.23 million km2 in 2023 to 4.60 million km2 in 2025, but all three recent minima remain among the satellite record's lowest and the long-run trend is down 12.1% per decade; annual rebounds do not erase the decline.
A single index of how close assessed species are to extinction, moving slowly and in one direction. It closes this topic because it is the curve with the longest lag between the cause and the measurement.
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