Post #487080

2026-03-02 00:21 UTC

Oh goodie. TL;DR: excess CO₂ in the atmosphere is altering human blood chemistry. It will exceed healthy limits within 50 years if we continue pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere at current rates. Not to mention what it will do to people who are already unhealthy, and to animal life in general. And no, beyond a certain level it’s not good for plants, either. That&#39;s another myth. But yeah, let&#39;s keep burning gas and oil, and eating meat. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5

Replies (5)

@dgoldsmith@mastodon.social 2026-03-02 00:23

I used to think that even if our willful ignorance caused human civilization to collapse, at least humans as a species would survive. Now it's not clear.

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@dgoldsmith@mastodon.social 2026-03-02 15:27

Again for people who have my boosts muted, a reply points out that newer data (for years after the range 2000-2020 included in the paper) does not follow the trend, and the paper’s results may not be statistically significant. I'm sure there will be discussion in the scientific literature. If the paper's conclusions turn out to be mistaken, we can all breathe a sigh of relief about this. It doesn’t change the fact that we're still playing games with complex systems all life depends on.

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@dotsie@mastodon.social 2026-03-02 05:44

@dgoldsmith the worst part is someone is going to see this and think they should create a startup that eventually makes portable oxygen fashionable and/or begins development on oxygenated air flow systems for the ultra wealthy in their homes and businesses. I fear the root cause is never going to be fixed in our lifetime and it’s already reached runaway, but there was a lot of good data in that paper.

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@HaraldKi@nrw.social 2026-03-02 07:43

@dgoldsmith Locking at the state of the world, my suspicion is, that the higher CO2 levels have already had non-negligible negative effects on human brain capacities. How can we collectively b so stupid?

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@hweimer@fediscience.org 2026-03-02 07:43

@dgoldsmith This paper looks highly suspicious. CDC published the NHANES 2021-2023 dataset in 2024, about one year before the paper was submitted: https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/continuousnhanes/default.aspx?Cycle=2021-2023 Average bicarbonate reported in the 2021-2023 data is 24.4 mmol/l, which is much lower than both the 2017-2018 and 2019-2020 values included in the paper. It is likely that inclusion of the 2021-2023 data would sink the entire paper. This looks a lot like statistical cherry-picking.

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