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Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

phys.org

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Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#61

Post by RobGR »

gcanyon wrote: post #5

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.

I've thought about making a C02 scrubber for indoor use. The simplest way, using commercial lime, would mean replenishing a consumable to keep it going. The C02 scrubbers that acquarium owners use also don't seem to be able to be regenerated.

I think it would be interesting to see what effect, if any, an indoor C02 level of near 0 would have on humans and mammals. Because your blood has to stay in a narrow PH range, and C02 is part of maintaining that, I wouldn't presume it would be good.

I think a small desktop C02 scrubber might have a market in the same demographic that pays for air ionizers, de-ionizers, HEPA filters and incense burners.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#62

Post by throw0101a »

ThomW wrote: post #3

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

For those unaware, this is the dialogue/caption in Tom Toro's 2012 New Yorker cartoon:

* https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

* https://tomtoro.com/cartoons/

* https://condenaststore.com/featured/the-planet-got-destroyed...

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#63

Post by Karawebnetwork »

gcanyon wrote: post #5

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.

The high school my friend's kids attend installed CO2 sensors during the pandemic as an indirect way to measure airflow.

It turned out the building had been sealed extremely tightly to keep out the winter cold and because it is old, it does not have a proper HVAC system.

They discovered that CO2 levels stayed around 1200 ppm throughout the entire winter, sometimes even higher. This had likely been the case for decades.

It is a school in a small, low‑income town. I cannot help wondering how many kids were labeled as underperforming when they were actually struggling with the effects of chronically elevated CO2 levels.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#64

Post by goodpoint »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
ThomW wrote: post #3

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

Clean tech will save the day (low carbon generation, batteries, electrification trajectories and rate of change, broadly speaking), but the global fossil industry will need to be dismantled faster than some will like. It is a matter of survival, not politics or economics. My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.

I think you are being downvoted because people only skim "Clean tech will save the day" without reading the whole text.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#65

Post by epistasis »

davidw wrote: post #28
amelius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the money for it. https://easypark.rs/news/cheapest-countries-to-park-in/

In the US, people bend over backwards to ensure that there is free storage for automobiles. And that housing and businesses are forced to include that expensive (parking spots can run into the 10's of thousands of dollars for some kinds of construction) amenity. Fortunately that's starting to change, but it is a big battle. And meanwhile, CO2 levels keep rising. ( This book goes into detail but is quite readable: htt…

More specifically, free for the person parking.

All the rest of society pays massive amounts in construction costs:

> adding tens of thousands of dollars per housing unit and, in some cases, increasing total construction costs by more than 50%.

This is from a recent update to Donald Shoup's estimates from the classic "The high cost of free parking": https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9f88x32n

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#67

Post by toomuchtodo »

boringg wrote: post #32
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean tech will save the day (low carbon generation, batteries, electrification trajectories and rate of change, broadly speaking), but the global fossil industry will need to be dismantled faster than some will like. It is a matter of survival, not politics or economics. My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.

Nuclear will save the day in combination with clean tech. Clean tech on its own is too slowly to be meaningfully impactful by the time we need it.

It takes ~ten years to build a nuclear generator. In that time, 10TW of solar PV will be deployed at current deployment rates (1TW/year), a bit higher than total global electricity generation capacity currently (~9TW).

Fusion is solved, at a distance, with solar, wind, and batteries. Half an hour of sunlight on Earth can power humanity for a year. Long duration storage remains to be solved for, but look how far we’ve come in 1-2 decades.

(at this time, short duration storage will likely be LFP, sodium, and other stationary friendly chemistries, but this could change as the state of the art advances rapidly and the commodities market fluctuates)

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#68

Post by eitau_1 »

kibitzor wrote: post #23
gcanyon wrote: post #5

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.

CO2 increase of 400ppm decreases cognitive function by >20% [1] I frequently send this medium article [1] to friends + family for a basic dive into how CO2 affects our thinking and abilities at various levels in common areas. The article cites a study [2] which graphs cognitive score for different activities at different CO2 concentrations. Each activity's cognitive score is worse at higher CO2 concentrations, EXCEPT…

I've started questioning this premise given that concentration of CO2 in the lungs (while resting) never falls below 10000ppm (I'm possibly underestimating this number).

Though I'm not excluding the possibility that indoor CO2 concentration strongly correlates with cognitive underperformance, which may be caused by other compounds emitted by human body.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#69

Post by toomuchtodo »

tw04 wrote: post #17
toomuchtodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean tech will save the day (low carbon generation, batteries, electrification trajectories and rate of change, broadly speaking), but the global fossil industry will need to be dismantled faster than some will like. It is a matter of survival, not politics or economics. My hunch is there are not many globally who want to suffocate while trying to exist for shareholder value.

I think you’re grossly underestimating how much the average American can deny with the assistance of social media. The number of people I personally know who thought the country was going to end on J6 who now call the entire thing a “political hoax” breaks my brain. Not to mention the endless posts about “where are all the people claiming COVID was so deadly now?” Who literally completely ignore the MILLIONS of death…

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/27/solar-powers-newest...

https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/11/05/impact-of-climate-cha...

https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/08/19/global-climate-change...

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2024/12/09/how-americans...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-...

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#70

Post by bob1029 »

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.

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