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Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

124 points by wkrsz

by ThomW

5 subcomments

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.“

by gcanyon

7 subcomments

Higher carbon dioxide makes us dumber: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7229519/
I wonder how long before in-home CO2 extraction becomes a thing.

by zug_zug

4 subcomments

> Humans evolved in an atmosphere containing roughly 280–300 ppm of CO₂. The average annual increase over the past decade has been about 2.6 ppm per year, with 2024 recording a 3.5 ppm rise.
So currently we're at 428 with 3.5 increase per year, yeah, that's scary if it doesn't slow down soon. Makes you wonder about what indirect health side-effects that could have on us.

by bob1029

1 subcomments

The human body has a fairly elegant regulation mechanism for handling variance in things like CO2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect
I think regular exercise can help to offset some of the effects of rising CO2 levels. Clearly not an end game solution but it's something to consider because you do have control over this one.

by throawayonthe

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i wonder how much specifically indoor co2 levels and levels in dense/industrial affect it
also is it accurate to say that the blood co2 level is mostly a snapshot of the moment blood is drawn? or is it affected by longterm environment

by beeforpork

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And while we pump CO2 into the atmosphere, we also shrink the engines that could get it out again, like the rainforest in Brazil. Perfect optimisation!
(I don't want to shame Brazil, it's a global chain of problems. And other forests are decimated, too, like in Sweden and Estonia, for the demand of produce worldwide.)

by deeg

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I remember when I first saw an oxygen bar at a mall and thinking how stupid it was. Fools and their money...
But who's laughing now?

by NoSalt

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I recently purchased a small CO₂ detector off Amazon for the house and work. So far, so good ... hovering around 450ppm.

by hxorr

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This is compounded by modern lifestyle factors such as staying indoors more, keeping the windows closed to help the aircon/heating be more efficient, etc.
I think a lot of people would be surprised at the CO2 level in different indoor environments they spend time in each day.

by stuaxo

4 subcomments

Plants grow faster (but not better) with more Co2 I wonder if this could be related to global obesity ?

by bethekidyouwant

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How do you unconfound this from being inside in better sealed environments for longer periods now? Not even mentioned?

by piloto_ciego

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This is actually my theory on why we're behaving so stupidly right now en masse.
I'm sure there's other papers out there, but this is the first one for this post: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...
Anyway, CO2 levels rise on planet earth, which cause indoor levels to rise too. As it turns out, because of ventilation and such, indoor levels are always a bit higher than outdoor levels. We cross some critical threshold and it gets really hard for us to take on complex cognitive tasks and make good decisions. This effects everyone equally more or less a bit worse at planning, a bit worse at solving problems, a bit worse and making critical decisions.
In the long run, planners make worse decisions, governments make work decisions, voters make worse decisions, students perform more poorly... you get the picture. Over 20 or 30 years these bad decisions start to ramp up into meaningful impacts on the world. At risk of "post hoc ergo proctor hoc"-ing myself, the tipping point for this being somewhere close to 400ppm would make a lot of sense, because people seem to be noticeably dumber some time after 2014 ish? Hard to really pin it down though, but once CO2 levels started to routinely crest over that 1000ppm it seems to me that the world started to get a lot crazier.
Like, we can blame it on one politician we don't like or another, or on bad economic forecasting, or on the schools, or on latent racism / sexism / whatever-ism. To be clear, those are all legitimate concerns, but at the end of the day we're just animals more or less stuck on this orb zipping through the cosmos and if we're suddenly unable to do high level reasoning as well wouldn't you expect to see an increase in "dumb ideas" being accepted?

by indoordin0saur

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This actually has me just as concerned as rising temperatures. And its a pretty hard thing to argue against, no matter your politics. Elon even brought it up when he did that interview with Trump in late 2024 to convince him that we should still care about CO2 levels in the atmosphere, even if you think the threat of a changing climate is overblown. Trump really had no response.

by jmclnx

1 subcomments

Related but flagged link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47202183

by chneu

1 subcomments

Reminder that an individual can cut their emissions by a staggering amount by just not eating meat/dairy.
Depending on how much you consume, you can cut your emissions by 50%!
Regenerative ranching is a lie and is more based in "vibes" and "energies" than science. Making beef production 0.01% more efficient then increasing consumption does not help. Meat is a "status symbol" food based in excess, grass fed beef is just another excuse to use more resources on a good to show how much of a status symbol it is. Grass fed beef is not good for environment. That's nonsense. It's less efficient beef called green. It's more expensive so people can claim superiority for buying it.
Our ego, pride, heritage, and machismo are used to manipulate us into beating our chests and consuming more protein, cuz winners eat 1.2g protein per kg and go to the gym. See how our health is used to manipulate us and justify excessive consumption in the form of "health and fitness"? Our colonist/conquerer society is dead set on us consuming more and more. We gotta buy more funco pops to keep up with social media influencers.
At the current point, the ONLY thing that makes sense is to cut your excessive consumption. We arent removing anything from the environment at this point and "recycling" and "regeneration" are meaningless.
We've blown past every milestone of destruction we have. We consistently increase our emissions and consumption. We are not doing anything to stop this.
Reduce and sacrifice is all that matters right now. Soon, a lot of this won't be an option for people, it'll be forced on them because of our selfishness today.
Our kids and grandkids have every reason to blame us. We are finding, creating and using every excuse we can for why this isn't our fault as we bite into a cheap burger.

by alexk307

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In the reference period 1999->2020, the instruments used by NHANES to track this data changed at least 3 times, they don't account for other changes to the general population that increase bicarbonate levels in serum (i.e. Number of obese Americans rose by ~40% in the reference period [1]). I'm not entirely convinced that using a proxy for C02 levels that can be confounded by a multitude of other health conditions that are common in the American population is a good way of going about this.
[1] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...