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CO2 overload, detected in human blood, suggests toxic atmosphere within 50 years
- OutOfHere 3mo ago[flagged]
- OutOfHere 3mo agoLook at your CMP (Comprehensive Metabolic Panel) blood test results. It has a test named Carbon Dioxide. This test may have a reference range of 20-32 mmol/L. Subtract your value from the max value -- that's your leftover buffer as the atmospheric CO2 rises, although serious intermittent problems are risked at a level of 31 itself. There is a more specific blood gas test that only a hospital can perform. Fwiw, my value reliably went down after I replaced citrate mineral supplements (calcium and magnesium) with glycinate capsules.
- jeffbee 3mo agoMine was 26 mmol/L yesterday, but the reference level is given as 22-29 by my lab, not 20-32.
- OutOfHere 3mo agoIn an objective sense, I actually think your noted reference level is the more correct level. I say this because I have experienced problems in the 30-32 range. Granted, we know that each lab's reference range can also vary for other reasons.
- jvanderbot 3mo agoOne interesting thing in the paper that I didn't think of, is that our breathing mechanism is tied to CO2 levels. And therefore, higher CO2 levels (not atmospheric high, but artificially high during studies), can trigger panic attacks and general stress. A slow suffocation hallucination, kind of. Even when there's still sufficient oxygen, your body doesn't "measure" oxygen! I didn't know that!
- giraffe_lady 3mo agoIt's a factor in "shallow water blackout" a fairly common death for experienced swimmers. Caused by hyperventilating prior to a long breath hold flushing too much CO2 out of your blood, so your sense of needing to breathe is suppressed relative to your need for oxygen.
- somenameforme 3mo agoYeah was going to hit on a similar point. When you hold your breath, that feeling that you need to breathe again isn't because you don't have enough oxygen, but because you have too much CO2. This is why things like hypoxia (lack of oxygen) can be so deadly in environments where it can be a thing (pilots, scuba, etc). Early onset symptoms include things like euphoria which isn't the most helpful warning from your body for 'death: imminent.'
- ooboe 3mo agoThis is the reason closed environments (e.g., space vehicles, submursibles, rebreathers) have CO2 scrubbers.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- oliwarner 3mo agoIt's also the reason people pass out and die in high-nitrogen or helium environments. Your body can still exchange out CO2 (and O2 in really high concentrations) and you just carry on until you... Stop. A couple of refrigeration engineers died near us at a poultry processing plant after it was found that the on-site liquid nitrogen tanks had a small leak. CCTV showed them just happily working in a room without ventilation and they just died. Was all very sad.
- tsoukase 3mo agoCorrect. Depth and frequency of breathing is regulated 90% by arterial CO2 level due to a direct, potent servo feedback based on a sensor in the brain stem. The rest is due to O2 level. A fatal situation happens with low CO2 and low O2 that doesn't increase breathing. Pneumo doctors hate this and it's an absolute indication for intubation and mechanical breathing.
- astro-lizard 3mo agoAs a software engineer, what can we do to help with anthropogenic emissions? I want to know how I can use my critical thinking to protect the future for us.
- thinkingkong 3mo agoIts not a software problem or a technical issue. At this point, it’s a social issue. Incentives are misaligned and as a result we’ll burn every last molecule of hydrocarbons to generate shareholder value.
- sam_lowry_ 3mo agoIt is everyone's issue, a software engineer can write more efficient code, choose to work for the sustainable future, not for most if not all AI companies and not for blockchain companies.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo agoBecome a monk. The solution is simple and not technical: Stop building and producing CO2
- JMKH42 3mo agoRemember Jevon's Paradox: most of us instinctively look to improving efficiency. But when you do that, people just use more of the thing. Rewriting Python in Rust often won't mean less electricity used, it means your code will get run more. For example, none of the improvements in combustion engine efficiency over the last 40 years have results in less gasoline being used, it resulted in bigger, more powerful cars and more driving of them. Really the biggest lever is reducing human population growth and mandating renewables when they are workable, even if moderately less economically viable.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- iknowstuff 3mo ago
- jmclnx 3mo agoShould not be a surprise since we have know about CO2 Levels and fossil fuels for many decades. The surprise is nothing was real was done. Compare what our generation did with this knowledge against the sacrifices the WW2 generation did. In WW2 many items were rationed in the US for the war effort, including gas. We knew something had to be done to be done in the 70s, but did we sacrifice our lifestyle for the good of the world ? No, our self-centered generation pumped even more CO2 into the air and is continuing to do so. Our grandchildren will pay dearly for what we did and are doing in decades down the line.
- rootusrootus 3mo agoI assume you mean boomers? Might time to stop blaming them, since at this point some of them are great-great-grandparents and the following generations do not seem to have shown any more appetite for changing course.
- OutOfHere 3mo agoBiden was all about changing course. The current felon-in-charge, an established boomer, is highly deserving of blame in this regard.
- JeffRosenberg 3mo ago> at this point some of them are great-great-grandparents And yet, insanely, they’re STILL the generation in power. Still breaking things even in their dotage.
- bethekidyouwant 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ratelimitsteve 3mo agoAssuming linear change. 5 yard penalty, repeat the down.
- strictnein 3mo ago"Toxic atmosphere" definitely implies something that I don't seem to be finding in the actual paper. We regularly sit in environments that are 2-3x the levels of atmospheric CO2. Also, was this paper AI written? > "There is now a considerable body of published data showing impacts at levels < 1,000ppm CO2, although the effects of exposure remain controversial." Which is followed by this, with the very AI "For example" that seems to mostly contradict that statement? > "For example, one study found no impact of exposure to levels up to 15,000 ppm (Rodeheffer et al., 2018), however the study population was a group of highly trained US Navy submariners. Conversely, studies in young adults (Satish et al., 2012), office workers (Allen et al., 2016) and university staff/students (Snow et al., 2019) showed negative effects at CO2 levels as low as 950 ppm." And then "Such studies are supported by assessment of CO2-induced changes in human brainwaves, measured by electroencephalography (EEG) combined with cognitive tests (reviewed in (Zhang et al., 2024)). Such studies show that exposure to CO2 between 1,000 and 2,500 ppm results in heightened brain activity." "Such studies" ... "such studies". And these studies seem to contradict the proceeding statement even more?
- dwroberts 3mo agoNot saying the paper isn’t AI, but “for example” is an extremely commonly used phrase that you should not be using as an AI indicator
- strictnein 3mo agoI get that it's common, but I just spent this week getting some patent docs ready, and was having GPT 5.5 help me with gathering some of the details. I had to remove "for example" dozens of times. So maybe it's just recency bias for me.
- OutOfHere 3mo ago[flagged]
- NDlurker 3mo agoCould be suffering from CO2 toxicity
- timr 3mo agoThis is such a bad paper. They take the NHANES data, average it for all participants, don’t bother controlling for things that have far more direct relevance to individual bicarbonate levels (e.g. diabetes, antacid use), and just assert that an observed correlation is causative.
- OutOfHere 3mo agoComplications of diabetes can lower serum bicarbonate, not increase it. In general, it is true that there are many causes of a rise in bicarbonate, but doesn't this only makes the situation more precarious?
- timr 3mo ago[flagged]
- OutOfHere 3mo agoDiabetic ketoacidosis causes low bicarbonate, not high.
- timr 3mo ago> Whatbaoutism is not a valid excuse. It’s not “whataboutism”. It’s a basic control in a paper that takes population data and asserts a causal link between a complex, personal biological variable and a global phenomenon. There are probably dozens of factors that matter a lot more to individual blood gas levels than global average co2. At a minimum, I’d expect to see controls for obvious medical factors before taking this argument seriously.
- OutOfHere 3mo agoFair point. I can see how a global rise in antacid use could explain it more easily. If antacids are the culprit, I expect the rise in bicarbonate to eventually asymptote. Still, we know that very high sustained carbon dioxide does risk respiratory acidosis and a rise in serum bicarbonate. The question then is whether a lower sustained rise also has an observed effect. Fwiw, as per Figure 2A, thus far we see a linear increase in the data, with no sign of it being asymptotic.
- CrzyLngPwd 3mo agoWhat are we, the powerless people, supposed to do with that as we watch super yachts, private jets, and armies bomb oil storage and gas pipelines? My office, with the window open, surrounded by trees and in the countryside, and the nearest large town being 20 miles away, shows 422ppm CO2 pretty consistently.
- IanCal 3mo agoPeople aren't powerless. They keep voting for people that do these things and/or keep giving them money to do it again and again. That's why they have money, that's why they have power, and as long as people keep rewarding them for doing it they'll keep doing it.
- boplicity 3mo agoAnyone else ever think of somehow building an at-home carbon-removal system, for lower carbon content in the air of your living spaces? I know it's a silly idea, but one that has occurred to me from time to time.
- schainks 3mo agoUh, do you mean house plants? There is also a Ted talk about taking this to an extreme, which does seem to anecdotally work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmn7tjSNyAA&pp=ygURdGVkIGthbWFsIG1lYXR0bGU%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmn7tjSNyAA&pp=ygURdGVkIGthb...
- cogman10 3mo agoHouse plants do reduce the amount of CO2 in your home but not by as much as you'd hope. The most efficient system is algae, but you require a pretty massive amount of it to compensate for the amount of CO2 a single person emits.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- cogman10 3mo agoDepends on the approach you want to take. It's possible but IDK if you'd see any sort of health benefits from simply lowering the CO2, you'd probably also want to increase the O2 content. This is actually a crazy thing that some of the very wealthy are doing in mountain homes. They have O2 tanks setup with their homes so that when they arrive they don't experience altitude sickness. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/mountain-town-home-oxygenation/ https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/snow-sports/...
- strictnein 3mo agoYeah, too many homes were built without fresh air intakes into the HVAC systems. There are definitely reasons you don't want it always pulling in outside air (temp and humidity differences, for example), but it would be nice to have the option to do it once a day just to freshen things up.
- ratelimitsteve 3mo agomy whole state right now is under an air quality advisory that is quite literally off the scale bad. breathing outdoors is currently considered "harmful to everyone" per the advisory and simply going somewhere outside your home requires an N95 mask (https://www.wtae.com/article/pennsylvania-code-purple-air-quality-wildfire-smoke/72819604 https://www.wtae.com/article/pennsylvania-code-purple-air-qu...).
- ck2 3mo agopersonally rooting for a gamma-ray burst within 8000 light years (which incidentally would have been traveling since the start of recorded human history) the entire upper atmosphere would be turned to nitrogen dioxide even the side of earth not facing the burst would have all life die very quickly because the ozone layer would just be GONE, so now all lethal ultraviolet solar radiation gets in too solves ALL our problems unfortunately Congress might survive a few more months in their underground bunkers but they are eventually doomed too
- himata4113 3mo agoHumans are extremely adaptable, for example there's people who work in extreme conditions underwater, what would be considered absolutely unbearable and torture is normal. More information on saturation diving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfiHc_rh4EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfiHc_rh4EY We're already slowly adapting to higher CO2 levels by sitting mostly indoors that have elevated CO2 from 500 to 800 with ranges up to 1500 (taken from my measurements at home). Claiming that it would be toxic doesn't pass the most basic checks that humanity experience already.
- UncleOxidant 3mo agoThere's probably a lot of genetic variation. For some it could be detrimental in 50 years, for others not so much. And for some swath in the middle it could be less than ideal. > We're already slowly adapting to higher CO2 levels by sitting mostly indoors that have elevated CO2 from 500 to 800 with ranges up to 1500 (taken from my measurements at home). But won't that 1500 be even higher indoors as CO2 in the atmosphere increases?
- OutOfHere 3mo agoHuh. Are you denying the upper safe level of serum bicarbonate? Just because we can tolerate 800 ppm of CO2 doesn't mean we can keep pushing it forever; there is clearly a limit. I suggest actually reading the paper. Diving is not a 24x7 activity, and so it doesn't relate.
- himata4113 3mo agosaturation diving IS a 24x7 activity, people often spend weeks in underwater pods. And the point I was trying to make is that the premise behind the paper doesn't hold up to scrutiny when indoors CO2 levels are already elevated like that.
- OutOfHere 3mo ago> when indoors CO2 levels are already elevated like that. That's not a good argument, considering this could in principle be a direct cause of the high bicarbonate.
- bottlepalm 3mo agoHistorically levels were around 250 and now they're generally over 450. I wonder if I would feel a cognitive boost or just plain better in general if I were breathing 250. Do they sell home CO2 scrubbers? I can easily increase the CO2 in a room, but how about decreasing it?
- UncleOxidant 3mo ago> Do they sell home CO2 scrubbers? They're called houseplants.
- OutOfHere 3mo agoYes, but technically, several hundred houseplants would be required to offset the indoor carbon dioxide to lower it sufficiently. This has been studied.
- rolph 3mo agosome people really love houseplants and go to long efforts to make them comfortable. although ive never heard of a plant hoarder, i can imagine a FD inspector raising eyebrows at a plant hoarding, esp. the fertilizers.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- the8472 3mo agoThose are humidifiers at best, the amount of CO2 they extract is negligible during the day and it goes negative during the night, they need to breathe too.
- OutOfHere 3mo agoYou can form a simple CO2 scrubber by buying colorized bulk soda lime, putting it in a HEPA filter bag, and running air through it, but it's very expensive. It'll probably cost $100 a day. Also, you'll still be on the hook for maintaining good ventilation so as to remove indoor bioeffluent VOCs. Better systems are being researched.
- snowwrestler 3mo agoThe atmosphere is the lowest possible value for your inhaled CO2. So it might be useful to think of this more in terms of impaired recovery rather than direct harm. Imagine a healthy person with a healthy lifestyle and 8 hours of sleep every night. But every year, they are awakened 5 minutes earlier. So after 6 years they are only getting 7.5 hours of sleep every night. After 12 years, it’s only 7 hours. Will this have a health effect over time? Obviously that example is a pretty big impairment. But the concept is what I’m getting at. Small persistent changes compound over time if there is no relief for recovery.
- quantified 3mo agoIF valid, there could be evolutionary advantage to those capable of calm and rational action in these conditions and, if they formed enough of a tribe, they could flourish.