The rise in CO2 is slowly poisoning us all

I’ve been at this climate communication game for a while now, and I’ve heard just about every bad argument the climate science deniers have come up with. There are all sorts, with varying degrees of sophistication, but perhaps the most absurd is the bold assertion that CO2 is not a poison gas. It’s generally paired with the reminder that plants need CO2 to live, and some derision of the notion that rising atmospheric CO2 levels would kill us all. Which has never been the claim.

The “rising CO2 will kill us all” line comes from the disastrous effects of a destabilized climate that we’re now seeing on a yearly basis. The jury’s still out on whether it will kill us all, but it certainly has the potential to destroy civilization as we know it, and our species’ survival is not guaranteed. We have no mystical destiny to reach the stars or anything like that, and rapid global warming is a known recipe for extinction. Nobody was claiming that it would kill us all by poisoning us!

In other news, the rise in atmospheric CO2 is poisoning us.

Rising carbon dioxide levels are being detected within the human body, with new research warning a key blood marker for the gas could near its healthy limit within decades if current trends continue. The findings are especially relevant for children and adolescents, whose developing bodies will experience the longest cumulative exposure to rising atmospheric CO₂.

In a study published in Air Quality, Atmosphere and Health, researchers from The Kids Research Institute Australia, Curtin University and The Australian National University (ANU) analysed more than two decades of U.S. population data and found steady shifts in blood chemistry that closely track the rise in atmospheric CO₂.

Using data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the team examined blood results from around 7,000 people every two years between 1999 and 2020.

Average levels of serum bicarbonate – a marker closely linked to carbon dioxide in the body – have risen by approximately seven per cent since 1999. Over the same period, average calcium and phosphorus levels have declined.

These changes mirror the rise in atmospheric CO₂, which has increased from about 369 parts per million (ppm) in 2000 to more than 420 ppm today.

Author Associate Professor Alexander Larcombe said the findings suggest the human body may already be compensating for a changing atmosphere.

“What we’re seeing is a gradual shift in blood chemistry that mirrors the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide which is driving climate change,” A/Prof Larcombe said.

I have to admit I didn’t see this one coming, but now that I think it through, I should have. This may be one of those times when the rhetoric of my opponents successfully guided me away from actually considering an angle of the whole thing. Our bodies use chemical reactions to take what we need from our air, water, and food, and get rid of the rest. CO2 is no exception.

And that change in blood chemistry is not without consequences. The associated decline in calcium and phosphorus may not be a big issue now, but these findings present us with a future in which much of humanity will need to be on supplements to counteract the fact that we have literally been poisoning our atmosphere (in a different way from all the other ways we’ve been poisoning our atmosphere).

Bicarbonate plays a central role in maintaining the body’s acid–base balance. When CO₂ levels rise, the body retains more bicarbonate to stabilise blood pH. Over time, however, sustained compensation may carry physiological consequences.

“If current trends continue, modelling 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 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.

Fellow Author Dr Phil Bierwirth, a retired environmental geoscientist who is affiliated with the ANU Emeritus Faculty, said while the study does not prove direct causation, the consistent, population-wide trends are difficult to ignore.

“I actually think that what we are seeing is because our bodies are not adapting,” Dr Bierwirth said.

“It appears we are adapted to a range of CO2 in the air that may now have been surpassed.

“The normal range maintains a delicate balance between how much CO2 is in the air, our blood pH, our breathing rate and bicarbonate levels in the blood.

“As CO2 in the air is now higher than humans have ever experienced, it appears to be building up in our bodies. Maybe we can never adapt such that it is vitally important to limit atmospheric levels of CO2.”

Honestly, it’s getting hard to keep track of all the ways in which we’re poisoning ourselves. That makes it all the more ridiculous when people insist that things like a rise in chronic health problems, or a decline in fertility are solely a matter of personal lifestyle choices like diet. That’s not to say diet isn’t important, but a healthy diet won’t negate the effects of a planetary atmosphere for which we are simply not evolved. Dinosaurs lived with higher CO2 levels than this, but it turns out dinosaurs are not humans, and they had evolved to thrive in that atmosphere.

We need to start thinking about this as if we’re all on an alien planet. If we don’t terraform it to conditions conducive to human life, we’ll have to take medication to counteract the poisons in the air we breathe, or live in sealed environments with limited exposure to unprocessed air. That may sound dramatic for something that can be treated with dietary supplements, but it’s even easier to treat hunger, and we’ve decided instead to use it as a weapon to control or eliminate people.

People used to joke about rich people controlling access to breathable air, but now? Now I’m thinking of a Stargate SG-1 episode in which a nation of Nazi aliens tried to genocide everyone else by poisoning the entire planet’s atmosphere from within a sealed bunker.

A long time ago, I urged people to think about global warming in terms of science fiction, because dealing with it will require such a revolutionary change in our society that it opens up all sorts of possibilities for a new kind of existence. That remains true.

The old world is collapsing, and nothing can save it. If we try to cling on to the past, we’ll be buried under its rubble.

The only hope our species has for a real future is to let go of what we know, and build something new.

The US healthcare system is a crime against humanity.

I suspect most if not all of my readership is on board with universal healthcare, but the Yale School of Public Health just released a new study, and I want to rant about it.

My fellow Americans, I don’t think you’re angry enough about healthcare in the US.

At this point, it’s more or less global common knowledge that the privatized healthcare system of the US costs a huge amount of money, in exchange for generally mediocre results. Those of us who follow this issue have known that tens of thousands of Americans die preventable deaths every year, because of the cost and inefficiency of healthcare. People are priced out of preventative medicine, and they avoid getting health problems checked out because they know they can’t afford treatment anyway, and so minor problems become major, and the price escalates accordingly.

I once heard an ER nurse say that “America doesn’t have a safety net, it has a greased chute. and at the bottom of that chute is one final trip to the emergency room”.

And it’s true. A majority of people manage to keep their heads above the water, but despite some small improvements under Obama’s ACA, it has gotten steadily worse. The US healthcare system was a big part of why my household decided to seek a better life in the lands of hope and opportunity across the Atlantic, and every time I worry it was a waste of the savings we spent to get here, I remember how much I have saved on health insurance, on healthcare, and how much better my health is because I know I can afford to get it checked out. That doesn’t mean things have been easy, but it’s hard to fully appreciate how much of a pyschological burden the US healthcare system is, until you’ve experienced something better. The UK’s NHS has its problems, as does the Irish system, but both of them are very clearly better, except perhaps for those with so much money they can easily fly to any specialist in the world.

But even I, with all my cynicism and experience, underestimated just how bad things had gotten in the US:

A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.

First, to be clear, “preprint” means that this study has not yet gone through the peer review process. It certainly fits my preexisting opinions well, but I’m not competent to assess the research for myself, and those who are have yet to render their verdict. The authors also stress that they did not have data for excess deaths among uninsured adults, and their estimate does not include the logistical costs of transitioning to a universal system.

As I said, it’s been clear that the ACA was a band-aid on a bullet wound, and at best seems to have slowed the rate of decline. The Yale researchers ran a model based on 2024 statistics to see how a system like Medicare for All would play out, compared to the reality. As far as I know, this does not account for the eugenicist nightmare brought to us by RFK. Jr. and the Republican Party.

The model identified five major sources of savings: lower pharmaceutical prices, Medicare-level payments to providers, reduced administrative overhead, less fraudulent billing, and fewer avoidable emergency department visits and hospitalizations. Even under more conservative assumptions about drug prices and fraud reduction, the researchers projected that the savings would reach at least $663 billion a year. Both figures account for an estimated $304 billion in additional spending to meet unmet medical needs, reimburse care that now goes unpaid, and provide universal dental coverage.

A universal healthcare policy would also save tens of thousands of lives, the researchers project. They estimate that adequate coverage for all could avert about 62,863 deaths annually — and that nearly half, or 29,631, would be among people who already hold insurance. These are the underinsured: the more than 45 million working-age adults whose deductibles and cost-sharing put care beyond financial reach anyway. Reversing coverage rollbacks and other health policies enacted since 2025 would avert a further 51,311 deaths each year, the researchers project, bringing the annual total to 114,174.

The study builds on findings Galvani, co-author Meagan Fitzpatrick, and other colleagues published in The Lancet in 2020, which projected that universal health care would save $450 billion and more than 68,000 lives annually. The larger estimates in the new study reflect ballooning health expenditures, a widening gap between commercial and Medicare payment rates, and new estimates on recent policy changes and the underinsured.

The excess deaths and the excess money share the same root causes: Greed and a disregard for human life. Every death enriches the people deciding who gets to live and who doesn’t. Let no defender of this system ever call themselves “pro-life” again, lest their hearing be damaged by derisive laughter.

The US already spends more than enough to cover a universal system, but a huge portion of that currently goes to advertising, to buying politicians, and to buying extra yachts and doomsday bunker mansions for executives and shareholders. We can do better.

And so I’d like to close with this thought exercise for my fellow Americans: Think about how much your health insurance costs. If you get it through your employer, include how much they contribute. How would your life change if that money was going into your pocket instead? What would you do with that money? How would it change your life?

Now add to that an end to medical bills as you know it. No more surprise letters demanding hundreds of dollars for an ambulance ride, or thousands for the treatment once you reach the hospital. No more worrying that if you get that pain checked out it’ll lead to medical bankruptcy. No more worrying that end-of-life medical care will leave your family with nothing.

It wouldn’t solve all of your problems, and no healthcare system is perfect, but imagine if yours was centered around your health and well-being, rather than the greed of a bunch of rich ghouls who get richer every time they deny someone needed care.

The world could be so much better for everyone than it is.

Fight for your scraps or starve, peasants!

I often talk about the importance of solidarity and organizing. I think I talk less about the obstacles to doing that, and the ways in which our society and culture are designed to divide people. Arguably the oldest version of this is patriarchy, in which humanity is divided in two, with one half holding a position of privilege and power over the other. The advantages that men get in this system are ones many men are willing to fight for, while ignoring the ways in which it might harm them. There is incentive to maintain the divide. White supremacy is a far more recent development, but it serves very much the same purpose – a framework for dividing up humanity, to justify and enforce varying levels of inequality and oppression.

The foundational divide in capitalism is between those who work for a living – selling portions of their life to survive – and those who make their money by owning the labor of others, and thus owning the fruits of that labor. Over the last century in the US, there has been a further division of the working class, in which those who could demand a high enough price for their labor were elevated to the “middle class”, which essentially meant “paid enough to live comfortably”.

Add in the moralizing of wealth that comes with the “meritocracy”, and the difference in wealth becomes a difference in worth. Why would those in the lofty heights of the middle class make common cause with the working class? If they want better lives, they should earn them like we did!

There’s also the “job market”. We are required to work a job in order to survive, but we have no right to a job. We must compete with everyone else to get work, and the knowledge is ever-present that for every time we “win”, someone else loses. That is, we are told, the only way it could ever be. This is a lie.

Solidarity and collective action work, and they work very well. They have been the bane of rulers throughout history, and the demon that haunts their nightmares. The power-mad people at the top never stop fearing that those below them will realize just how much they’re being screwed, and will rise up as one. It’s why they want to watch all of us, constantly. It’s why they always act to crush unions and solidarity. It’s why they never stop thinking of new ways to set people against each other.

The latest innovation on this front is the notion of forcing workers to bid for shifts. It’s not enough to have the job anymore, now you have to compete with everyone else for hours, and whoever is willing to work for the least pay, gets the job.

This is, of course, a fantastic deal for the owning class. Workers (no longer “employees”, I think) will bid down their own wages, without any need for pesky negotiations, and if they act as intended, they will blame each other for the constantly-falling wages, rather than working together to demand a better system.

Naturally, this is a recipe for a desperate, stressed work force, with no sense of stability. Having no reliable schedule, they will probably also be poorly rested, and have difficulty organizing their time outside of their unreliable and unpredictable schedule. All of this means workers will make more mistakes, but maybe that won’t matter for some jobs (if we don’t care about the workers’ quality of life). There are plenty of jobs that can probably be done under those conditions, so which body of workers are we talking about here?

As has increasingly become the case with ride-share companies, the “Uber for nurses” model relies on artificial intelligence to set pay rates for work shifts, to surveil performance metrics, and to use that data to determine a worker’s future access to gigs and pay rates. The industry also allows nurses to bid on work shifts, with the lowest pay rate winning the shift.

The model has been lucrative for its promoters. Three nurse gig platforms have reached a $1bn valuation, according to the report, as they have received an influx of investment from private equity firms and are securing government contracts to staff public facilities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers.

“AI is incorporated into all these human management software systems, and for nurses that means dropping them into all kinds of places, without orientation, without workers’ comp, without any way to protect themselves if they’re sick and they need to cancel,” said Dr Katie J Wells, co-author of the report and a senior fellow at AI Now. “That also means, for a lot of these apps, using AI technologies to facilitate a bidding war against nurses.”

A screenshot of a quick-bid auction from a nurse gig platform, Clipboard Health, states: “You can choose the rate you’d like as a bid, and the lowest bid wins!”

The auction allows gig nurses to make an hourly-wage bid for work shifts at a medical facility, and the lowest-wage bid secures the position.

Clipboard Health also uses disciplinary point systems for gig nurses, including deducting points from nurses for canceling a shift, with more points deducted for less notice being given for the cancellation, and other point deductions for showing up late to shifts.

Oh yeah, for a second I forgot that we live in the bad timeline.

So I’m a little late to this one. The quoted article is from back in April, but the problem hasn’t gone away, and it’s such a perfect demonstration of how workers are set against each other for the benefit of the owning class. The people who rule us see any comfort, security, or happiness among workers as evidence that we’re not being fully exploited, and that is tantamount to theft from the company. The actual wellbeing of the people who work for them is of no concern, so long as those people don’t cause trouble.

As with the rising temperature, this isn’t going to go away on its own. It’s going to keep getting worse until workers are organized and militant enough to force a change. The folks at the top never stop thinking (or paying others to think) about new ways to divide and oppress the people below them, so we must never stop thinking about ways to close those divides and fight all oppression.

If nothing else, the fact that our rulers are so committed to keeping us divided should tell you the importance of solidarity.