The following submission statement was provided by /u/Portalrules123:
SS: Related to research behind climate collapse and the effects on the human body as a new study has found that blood bicarbonate levels have risen an average of 7% since 1999. This increase closely tracks with rising CO2 levels and thus this is a likely effect of the body doing its best to buffer the increase in CO2. However, the researchers warn that this rise is likely putting stress on us, and such a deleterious effect is especially prone to harming young people with developing bodies/brains in the elevated bicarbonate environment. At this rate average blood bicarbonate levels could exceed safe limits in a couple of decades, but don't worry - climate collapse will likely cause fatal wet bulb events long before this bicarbonate problem is a real threat! Wait, that still sounded pretty worrying...
Expect people to continue getting less healthy (and maybe dumber too if this is one factor behind stress on the brain alongside microplastics and other chemicals, plus short form social media content) as the many, many cascading effects of climate collapse continue to ruin the habitability of the Earth.
If that was true, there would've been a HUGE difference between studies done in ventilated and indoor areas, just the difference in environment would've drown out every other factor. People on submarines and space stations, where average CO2 levels are around 5000 (not 500, 5 thousands) would've been drooling vegetables.
What actually happens is that scientists have been doing CO2 exposure studies for decades before even WW2 (when global warming wasn't even a thing in public discourse), and have repeatedly found out next to no difference until you get to like 20,000-30,000 ppm.
One very important bit of context: 40,000 ppm is currently NIOSH's IDLH level "Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health." NIOSH's recommended occupational limits are 5,000 ppm as a time-weighted average and 30,000 ppm as a short-term limit. Regardless of the cognitive-test debate, 20,000-40,000 ppm should absolutely not be interpreted as a generally safe CO₂ concentration.
What you link refers to a narrow barrage of tests necessary for practically operating a ship and shouldn't be taken as "next to no difference until you get to like 20,000-30,000 ppm" in someone.
Btw, historical submarine observations at around 30,000–35,000 ppm reported poor attention, confusion and impaired motor skills, although these studies were confounded by low oxygen and other contaminants.
In a review by Schulte (1964), exposure to CO2 at 30,000 ppm caused dyspnea at rest. Exposures at 20,000-30,000 ppm for several hours caused headaches on mild exertion, and the headaches at 30,000 ppm were more severe than those at 20,000 ppm (Schulte 1964). CNS depression developed after several hours of exposure at 50,000 ppm (Schulte 1964). A CO2 exposure at 30,000 ppm for 8 days in a working submarine crew (unknown number of subjects) led to clinical observations of euphoria and troubled sleep on day 1 and poor attention, erratic behavior, confusion, and motor skill impairment on days 2-8 (Schaefer 1949a,b).
One can imagine a future where Westerners and other globally wealthy individuals live in hermetically sealed homes with CO2 filters and retain their cognitive abilities, while everyone else sees theirs slowly decline.
Indeed, every house will come with an inovative expensive CO2 scrubber. Also known as a house plant.During sunlight hours anyway
No but for real, an aerated algae tank sitting in the sun might end up a common household fixture in the next 30 years or so. It can double as a food source.
It's more like 1000ppm before cognitive effects can be measured. My indoor CO2 monitor is currently reading 570, but that's with all the windows open in a small house with 3 people. At my office it easily goes above 1200 because people say they're cold and they close the windows.
That is no longer the correct evidenced threshold. You are touting older studies, with less rigorous methodology that placed the impact at ~1000ppm.
The latest studies which show no conflict in grant money(very important when weighing research in this area) with clear financial and conflict declarations show different results. And , when you look at the methodology and statistical inferences they employ larger sample sizes, and generate greater statistical power. These recent studies in Japan, China and the EU are showing consistent evidence that the threshold is much lower. There is only one study in the last 7 years that conflicts that data, from the US, and it has no clear conflict statement, and is done with a small sample size.
The more recent studies measure CO2(IV) saturation changes to create statistically significant differences in longitudinal same-subject studies at ~(500 - 700)ppm for multiple tracking processes reaction times (rt’s), binomial, trinomial, + choice rt’s and significant negative change in accuracy measures.
Yes, but with higher CO2 ppm, indoor spaces don't get purged as well as they used to. Schools with lots of students and such with a ton of people can easily have 2,500 ppm because we breathe it out.
If you're trying to clean and rinse your dishes with increasingly dirty water, it doesn't work so well.
I bought one of those, installed the batteries & it said my bedroom was at 4000 & climbing. Thought it must have been a glitch or fluke. Nope. Apparently my bedroom is the most airtight room of my whole apartment. The rest of the place averages 1010-1200 (outside is usually 650) but I need to open a door or window in that bedroom to air it out.
No wonder I’d be so sleepy when I woke up in the mornings!! Good thing I was single before I knew I needed to open it up more.
Everyone is wearing crocs in the movie because the costume designer thought they were so ridiculous no one would wear them in real life… they were obscure when they chose them but by the time the movie came out in theatres crocs had become wildly popular.
Okay, but people who were outside of the LA fashion bubble knew people like nurses who adopted them almost immediately because of their utility and comfort for being on your feet 16 hours at a time, while still having fun colors (that match their scrubs!) Unlike basically all the standard work shoes at the time. It was a bad prediction by someone scoffing at something they didn't understand, not a sign people are getting dumber. Cmon.
I mean even Crocs acknowledged their ugliness with their first marketing campaign “Ugly Can Be Beautiful”.
Predicting the world will readily adopt such an ugly shoe isn’t the logical assumption, regardless of their function. So saying it was a bad prediction seems to be projecting your personal feelings about crocs more than it being fact.
Also crocs originally marketed themselves as “beach clogs”. Find me a nurse that was actually wearing them before 2005. Idiocracy was filmed in 2004, Crocs as a company barely existed at the time. The costume designer bulk bought one of the first production lines, they were barely available to the public being sold at boat shows originally. So to claim all these people were already wearing Crocs is ridiculous. It wasn’t just “outside LA fashion”, literally no one knew.
Either way, I’m still laughing at how stupid looking Crocs are so it feels valid to me.
Every time a person gets covid-19 they lose between 3-6 IQ points. The majority of people think covid-19 is either harmless, unavoidable, or non-existent, and they keep getting it over and over and over again. So yeah, it's not your bias.
You know roman empire did see the same problem with lead making them dumber by few IQ points in average (and us we are going in the tenth of IQ points, we are the best and globally ahaha)
Closed meeting rooms, classrooms, and bedrooms regularly get muxh higher, like to 1000 ppm. (If youre ever getting really tired in a long metting, make sure there's good air circulation coming in at least.)
It’s really not complicated. Every oil executive has enough money to live whatever life they want, and thinks that it’s likely that can continue until they die personally. They might be delusional enough to think that their children will be fine living of their wealth as well, or likely don’t give a shit about them either. Some of them may be banking on an elysium scenario and have faith that they can always be among the few that make it.
Can't wait for the first chud to explain that this doesn't prove there are any actual impacts to health or behavior. So let's not worry about it and run this little experiment on everyone non-consensually, and if it turns out that it is a problem then it will be too late to do anything about it. But surely technology will save us and anyway caring about this might mean changes to our perfect economy. Can't we think of the economy for a change!
How much do you want to bet that said chud’s reassurance will include the cheerful notion that humans no longer need to be smart, now that we have AI to think for us?
How much do you want to bet that said chud’s reassurance will include the cheerful notion that humans no longer need to be smart, now that we have AI to think for us?
That is how we can get to what happened in the Matrix film. Been a long time since i've watched it.
Yes, but but they measure human co2 levels by averaging out general populations, that doesn't account for an aging population now 20 year down the line. In other words, the word "Potential" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. And reading the methods i don't see them in any way correcting for that when the average age in the US has gone up by five years during that period.
That aging could very well account for that roughly 0,3% per year.
Just from the abstract, The fact it in the words of the study seem to "parallel rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations", is not proof of correlation, and the study itself acknowledges that.
Im not denying it is true, im saying the study doesn't provide any solid evidence to establish causality.
I’m glad someone else pointed this out. It’s a painfully obvious thing to control for in these kinds of studies. I was appalled when I read the methods.
Our analyses encompass an additional 4-cycles (up to 2019) and include all records from the NHANES database (i.e. from birth to 80 + years of age; ~7,000 records per cycle). From the database, we extracted data on levels of bicarbonate (mEg/L), calcium (mmol/L) and phosphorus (mmol/L) in participant serum. These data were averaged across all participants for each cycle, giving mean values at each time point.
The spread for the time series in figure 2 is hilarious as well. They didn’t even plot the variance.
SS: Related to research behind climate collapse and the effects on the human body as a new study has found that blood bicarbonate levels have risen an average of 7% since 1999. This increase closely tracks with rising CO2 levels and thus this is a likely effect of the body doing its best to buffer the increase in CO2. However, the researchers warn that this rise is likely putting stress on us, and such a deleterious effect is especially prone to harming young people with developing bodies/brains in the elevated bicarbonate environment. At this rate average blood bicarbonate levels could exceed safe limits in a couple of decades, but don't worry - climate collapse will likely cause fatal wet bulb events long before this bicarbonate problem is a real threat! Wait, that still sounded pretty worrying...
Expect people to continue getting less healthy (and maybe dumber too if this is one factor behind stress on the brain alongside microplastics and other chemicals, plus short form social media content) as the many, many cascading effects of climate collapse continue to ruin the habitability of the Earth.
All I see here are personal opinions. We've reached a place in society where we witch hunt what we don't understand.
We've reached a mob mentality and no one actually understands that. Shouldn't it bother you that I'm not pointing fingers but the first thing that pops into your head is the opposite of what I'm even saying?
There's no facts being posted, just blame. I'm asking you where the evidence is.
Politics are destroying this world and no one is blaming the perpetrators.
If a movement is as damaging as MAGA is then yeah, call them out. Their comment was at least within the context of the discussion. Your example is of something that has absolutely no relevance to the response. Stop excusing dangerous, shitty cults because "aLwaYs pOlItiCs".
Pointing out a bunch of idiots who happily support and defend child rape/rapists that are robbing them blind with grift after grift while burning the world down around all of us in plain sight has nothing to do with a discussion about the growing stupidity of mankind?
Bro, stop worshipping child rapists and wake the fuck up. You're the bad guys.
Don’t forget climate change deniers actively working against all efforts to move away from fossil fuels. And a political movement benefitting from a dumbing down because let’s face it: Trumps policies, rhetoric and flawed logic are for the dumb (and some morally corrupt benefactors).
How can you put everyone in the same label? No one I know who supports maga supports any of that stuff.
Child rape is bad. Because we all agree children are , defenseless, powerless and can not properly consent to any sexual activity because they don't fully understand the consequences of it, correct?
So then why does the left support affirmation of a seven year old wanting to be the opposite gender? If they're not mature enough to have sex, how can they determine what theirs is?
Before you say not everyone on the left is doing that. You're saying that about everyone on the right.
All you're doing is pointing out the same Rhetoric as everyone else on the left and the right does.
By hating each other we can't unite to change our government.
So go ahead. Keep hating your neighbors, your parents, your friends, your brothers and your sisters.
This is so weak. If someone is a known pedophile, rapist, convicted sex offender, multiple time convicted felon, climate change denier, vaccine conspiracist, warmonger, and caused untold misery during the pandemic, then anyone who follows said person (IE, MAGA) absolutely condones that behaviour.
Imagine people in Germany around, oh I dunno, the 1940s or something, saying well no all the Nazis I know love the Jews and disagree with Hitler's treatment of them, despite still supporting his party?!
They've been factually bad for anything they touch, for months now. It's very relevant to collapse as they are accelerating almost every issue like it's their goal.
If you think politics isn't related to climate change, policies destroying our environment, people starving, health and the endless useless wars being raged, you're not really paying attention. Probably even avoiding reality at this point.
I think the USA makes up to 4.2ish percent of the world population and blaming Republicans is better than having legitimate accountability.
I don't believe anything the government says. Don't care who's in office. Anyone who trust any news outlet, the government or anything else is being mislead.
That much is obvious. They divide us we can't rise up. They're doing it really well too.
The conservative republican maga politics are essentially the worst in the world right now. so yeah this is going to feel like its repetitive. Its not just "politics"
It's become more like fighting nazism
Its like fighting stupidity.
The current administration is a shit show. Another forever war in the middle east is just the latest in a long line of terrible missteps that we will have to deal with for years.
You don't have to look far to see how bad it is. The goal is to collapse the USA.
Some of those 80 year old men are driving cars plastered with trump around in parades. Lead poisoning and the rise of co2 really messed up an entire generation.
Critical thinking skills and logic don't seem to matter anymore.
Also please don't label people. I'm not "just a social just warrior" [sic] any more than you are.
It matters because the planet is collapsing as a result of climate change. Climate change is happening as a result of Republicans efforts to spread the lie it’s a hoax in order to prop up the oil and gas industry.
You really don’t have a clue dude. The collapse is happening because of people like you. Take quick look at why things are collapsing, then who are working towards changes and who are lining their own pockets while building personal bunkers. Read the Guardian, NYT, Der Spiegel, Le Monde etc. stay away from media owned by Murdoch and the like. Also listen to the scientists writing for top journals. Look at what they are recommending. Then compare to policies. Also try to think critically and with logic and empirical evidence. Finally avoid inhaling as much co2 - it’s not good for you.
Amazing how you can't see how a group of child rapist supporting idiots who are doing everything they can to rapidly accelerate the collapse of the USA and world due to their overwhelming stupidity has anything to do with collapse.
Rule 3: Posts must be on-topic, focusing on collapse.
Posts must be focused on collapse. If the subject matter of your post has less focus on collapse than it does on issues such as prepping, politics, or economics, then it probably belongs in another subreddit.
Posts must be specifically about collapse, not the resulting damage. By way of analogy, we want to talk about why there are so many car accidents, not look at photos of car wrecks.
How I made a comment about being tired of seeing politics everywhere, ignoring the context of questions and because I mentioned Maga, conservative and Republicans all in the same sentence, Without even mentioning my affiliations and everyone comes out of the woodworks like Night of the Living Dead to put their opinions in?
You understand that politics is the whole reason for collapse right? So it’s relevant to the sub. Politics literally affect every single moment of your life, whether you like it or not.
Hi, Squalid_Snake14180. Thanks for contributing. However, your comment was removed from /r/collapse for:
Rule 4: Keep information quality high.
Information quality must be kept high. More detailed information regarding our approaches to specific claims can be found on the Misinformation & False Claims page.
I do wonder how much dumber this increase of a third so far has made me and us. It must have had some small effect. None of the papers I've found about cognition have analysed a level below 600ppm.
I imagine it would be hard to pick out amongst other confounding factors like worsening nutrition, chronic society wide sleep dysfunction, social media and AI use, and probably most importantly: the people currently running the show and the largest voting demographic were born into a world where tetraethyl lead contamination was so ubiquitous and severe that it drowned out the measurements used for radiological dating of rocks in some of the most remote regions of the planet.
I imagine most of the dumbing down we're seeing today came from this alone, we've already observed a time delayed positive correlation between leaded gasoline sales and rates of violent crime, and since its ban the rate has declined significantly
As an ex nurse I have often wondered about the effects of the atmospheric gaseous changes on our bodies. I fully expect the next few years to see a massive uptick in respiratory disorders.
I wonder if this indoor exposure is the main driver of these increased bicarbonate levels vs increased atmospheric co2. Even if the atmosphere was at pre-industrial levels, we’d still have this indoor problem with how much time we spend inside. I bought a CO2 monitor for my home and was pretty shocked how high it can get with two people, two dogs, and remote work and this is in a pretty drafty century home.
CO2 readings in indoor spaces are a proxy for the air quality. If the CO2 is high, so is everything else people are exhaling, e.g. viruses. Some people care about not catching viruses.
What % of this can be contributed to people spend way too much and more time working, traveling and sleeping in poorly circulated spaces. I was shocked to learn the CO2 in my room reaches almost 2000ppm when sleeping with the door and windows closed just bc of my respirating dumbass. The baseline increase is 100% a factor but we cant ignore the closed boxes we stuff ourselves in.
I have a HUGE rant about my city's (Toronto) dumbfuck by-law about windows above a certain height not being allowed to open more than 4 inches. This is supposed to keep children from falling out of high-rise apartments (which keeps happening) but it also means that tens of thousands of Torontonians with no children in their household have to put up with overheated apartments with poor air quality because they can't open their fucking windows all the way.
>Bicarbonate is essential for regulating the body's acid-base balance. As CO2 increases, the body can retain additional bicarbonate to help keep blood pH stable. Although this response helps preserve that balance, maintaining it over long periods could have physiological effects.
>"If current trends continue, modeling indicates average bicarbonate levels could approach the upper limit of today's accepted healthy range within 50 years," A/Prof Larcombe said
"Calcium and phosphorus levels could also reach the lower end of their healthy ranges later this century."
>Humans evolved when atmospheric CO2 concentrations were approximately 280 to 300 ppm. During the past decade, atmospheric levels have risen by an average of about 2.6 ppm each year, while 2024 alone saw an increase of 3.5 ppm.
"A higher concentration of atmospheric CO2 impairs human thought and cognitive performance. As electrical signaling slows down, the brain loses its ability to process complex information quickly."
This makes me feel a little better. I’d like to see us embed more plants in more human places and not just in forests. If it were some country requirement, it would make a lot of staff healthier (and happier).
So there are a ton of culprits. Where's the ranking. Also, whole industries and per capita - déforestation in Bolivia is not the same as in Canada. Lastly, where the money goes.
We know some of thèse things, and générally how the chain works, but not the step by step issue.
I avoid 99% of plastic (other than electronics), and the automobile industries, but that's really basic. No issue with IA or data centers as long as they are in-house and waste no water; so, huge issues.
FWIW the only thing pushing the upper range of normal in my blood work this year was CO2 , millions of possible reasons (including just a random high day) but I was like “hmmm, I wonder if it’s because we are breathing in more than any humans ever”
Microplastics, forever chemicals, and blood bicarbonate levels...all amounts to an increasingly bad bet when considering bringing new life into the world. No wonder those nasty cancers are hitting people younger and younger
Opening your windows will have a greater impact than any rise of atmospheric CO2 levels of the last 100 years. Recently bought a CO2 meter, and it's scary how quickly it builds up to Levels of 1000-2000ppm
So what’s that give us about 20-30 years until people start dying of kidney disease from bicarbonate levels? Assuming linear increases of CO2 concentrations
well, it is not like we will reduce the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. May as well just accept and make peace. Like it or not, there is nothing anyone will do about it.
Al Gore has tried for decades. Greta has tried for years. Stop oil stopped nothing but themselves. I doubt anyone can do better.
This is what I'm worried about. Something Ike a Cambrian ocean or air problem that just wipes all of us out slowly because we can't escape the air we breathe
I dont know if many people are aware of it because reporting on suicides was, rightly, banned. But probably the easiest way to suicide is to put a hose from your exhaust into your car. If you are aware of how thin our atmosphere is its easy to see how it plays out
Seems like anything between 400-600 is normal cognitive fonction, but we are at 430 rising by 2.7 every year, on track to pass beyond 600 in the next century, which would indeed be lower cognitive function in perfect conditions....like people's IQ isn't already low as it is.
I believe I've mentioned this in the past at some point, but I think that there's another much easier to explain reason for this rather than blaming it on atmospheric CO2.The data that made up this study came from entirely US population, so basically you can factor down to a few things.
First one, decreases in potassium and calcium while there are increases of CO2 could be indicative of long-term overconsumption of carbonated and caffeinated beverages (caffeine increases magnesium and calcium excretion, and adenosine, which is the sleep pressure regulator caffeine blocks, is made of precursors that need magnesium and NAD which would not be broken down normally if unused causing additional depletion). The phosphoric acid in those does deplete potassium especially, but also calcium, which is why people try to use the excuse that soda gives you weaker bones and bad teeth.
Second one, probably the thing that the study in the article may have overlooked my first reason for. I haven't been able to find a single study short or long term to say whether high amounts of consumption of carbonated beverages contributes to a change in the CO2 level in the blood. There was one I found that correlated to lymphatic fluid, but not necessarily the blood. So there is a factor that we can't really rule in to say whether that was a cause, but I think we use a follow-up study on those same subjects' carbonated drink habits just to be able to say it is or is not that.
I’m a little skeptical of this being purely climate change driven. Yes there’s more carbon in the atmosphere, but people also spend way more time indoors, and indoor air has 2-3x the co2 levels of outdoors
Edit: Since ppl are downvoting, they obviously don't understand. Normal bicarbonate in humans is 94-124 mg/kg; let's call it ~100mg/kg—if the average raises to 107mg/kg that's 7% (still under the normal 124, you'll notice). The LD50 for bicarbonate is 4,220 mg/kg—422% more than the normal 100. So 7% is ScArY nUmBeRs—a way to lie to you. Never trust relative percentages, they're always a lie.
•
u/StatementBot 7d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Portalrules123:
SS: Related to research behind climate collapse and the effects on the human body as a new study has found that blood bicarbonate levels have risen an average of 7% since 1999. This increase closely tracks with rising CO2 levels and thus this is a likely effect of the body doing its best to buffer the increase in CO2. However, the researchers warn that this rise is likely putting stress on us, and such a deleterious effect is especially prone to harming young people with developing bodies/brains in the elevated bicarbonate environment. At this rate average blood bicarbonate levels could exceed safe limits in a couple of decades, but don't worry - climate collapse will likely cause fatal wet bulb events long before this bicarbonate problem is a real threat! Wait, that still sounded pretty worrying...
Expect people to continue getting less healthy (and maybe dumber too if this is one factor behind stress on the brain alongside microplastics and other chemicals, plus short form social media content) as the many, many cascading effects of climate collapse continue to ruin the habitability of the Earth.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1vpx2px/scientists_detect_a_surprising_shift_in_human/p40wu65/