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Comment by rho138 | Hacker News Reader

Nah guys, it’s cool, by 2050 the earths atmosphere acidifies for humans and our bodies can’t hold enough phosphorus or calcium for basic metabolic tasks: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5

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The increase in atmospheric CO2 in the coming decades is nothing compared to how much CO2 increases in a closed room - for example a bedroom that you spend 8 hours in[1]. The paper you linked even notes this (exerpt below). This kind of alarmism just gives more ammunition to folks who want to entirely dismiss CO2 as a problem, but sure, let's keep ringing that bell.

> For example, The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS) found that Americans spent an average of 87% of their time in enclosed buildings and ~ 6% of their time in enclosed vehicles in 1992–1994 (Klepeis et al., 2001). This has potentially increased since the COVID-19 pandemic (Young et al., 2024), with many people working-from-home in environments with poor mechanical air-ventilation (Nazaroff, 2021). The proportion of time spent in indoor, CO2 enriched environments could also contribute to the changes in blood chemistry noted in the NHANES data and is an important consideration in interpreting changes over time, and forecasts for the future.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013232...

There's countries like Panama where medical blood tests are common to get an office job and also employ outsourcing with contractors on site to boost productivity and avoid sick down time. Like here https://copa.gcs-web.com/company-profile I know this causes a lot of false negatives and unnecessary over treatment. Basically they expect you to not need the salary and reject those who would benefit from a salary for private healthcare because public healthcare often has no supplies. Also, Humanity would much rather kill itself than do things the right way.

I’m so confused

It's shifting into employees the effects of climate change. Filtering them out as a personal responsibility problem. Those unlucky to "need" treatment because they failed the test and are thus not hired are thus stuck in a poverty circle. Business as usual, not reducing emissions is accepted even though it is guaranteed death in a few years.

Shades of Gattaca: "Society has categorized Vincent Freeman as less than suitable given his genetic make-up and he has become one of the underclass of humans that are only useful for menial jobs."

I imagine there are some choice concepts in US employee health "benefits" to filter out high-insurance-risk employees.

Fascinating! I don't know enough about the field to really weigh in on it but it does seem intuitive that some of this could cause cumulative issues.

Typically you balance out CO2 excess with phosphorus/calcium, so again, seems intuitive.

But a lot of things that are intuitive can be completely wrong because of something one can be ignorant of. Time shall tell.

This article is nonsense. It takes observational data from a survey, averages it, doesn’t control for obvious medical factors that more strongly influence the observed data than climate (e.g. illnesses), and then asserts that the correlation is causative.

It is not science. It’s just propaganda.

To what end? Either there’s a global conspiracy to destroy the planet or theres’s a global conspiracy to save the environment?

Or neither option in your false dichotomy has any relation to the quality of this paper?

You quite literally used the word “propaganda” which is an intentional attempt to mislead or hide the truth. If the quality of the paper is in fact purposefully low and youre saying its for a reason just say what the reason is.

The reason is that it's propaganda.

That also isn't even close to what the word means.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda

I look forward to reading your research article refuting this one. Please let us know the arxiv url when you're ready to publish.

Typically bad research doesn’t require another article to be refuted. Is there something different about this case specifically?

i instead look forward to your study reproducing the results?

Are you saying you think it’s unreasonable to disagree on a research paper unless you commit to publishing another paper in response?

Fairly sure "may" means something different to "is" but maybe I'm just not the target audience and am reading it wrong.

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