The increasing CO2 level affects human blood

The science

An interesting recent research paper (February 26, 2026), Carbon dioxide overload, detected in human blood, suggests a potentially toxic atmosphere within 50 years, documents the change in acidity (pH) of human blood from 1999 to 2020. That is not surprising in view of the increase in CO2 levels from ~380 ppm in 1999 to ~414 ppm in 2020.

The researchers found that average levels of serum bicarbonate, a chemical marker closely linked to carbon dioxide in the body, have risen by about 7% since 1999. Over the same period, average calcium and phosphorus levels in human blood has declined. There is a gradual shift in blood chemistry that mirrors the rise in atmospheric CO2.

The physicists at phys.org published a lay audience commentary on this paper, including some comments by the two authors. One commented that the data suggest to him that our our bodies are not adapting well and we may be close to limits that our blood chemistry can handle for CO2.

Currently, adverse health impacts are speculative and hard to quantify. This research adds to evidence of an emerging dimension of climate risk that extends beyond heat waves, extreme weather, sea-level rise, and crackpot climate science denial.

Context & commentary

Humans existed mostly in times when CO2 levels were mostly fairly close to about 300 ppm or less, so what we are now in is uncharted territory. Humans came on the scene about 150,000 years ago. Obviously, we have no choice but to inhale more CO2 as its level in air continues to rise. That is expected to increasingly affect blood bicarbonate, calcium and phosphorous levels. Under the current trend, the air we breathe will become increasingly powerful, eventually becoming toxic decades from now. We do not know what non-trivial effects, if any, on human health this altered state of blood chemistry is having right now. A lot more research needs to be done.

The researchers say that going forward, all the data now clearly indicates that biomarkers like blood bicarbonate levels in humans and other species need to be tracked along with traditional global warming indicators.

Q1: Which global warming threat do you feel is greatest, heat waves, extreme weather, sea-level rise, or crackpot climate science denial?

Q2: Are you unconcerned about this change in your own blood chemistry or in your family’s blood chemistry?

Q3: Is this research just more lies from allegedly corrupt or socialist scientists, is it lies from or Chinese agents trying to destroy the American economy with their alleged cynical lies and crackpot science?

Reputable climate change info resources

If you are faced with crackpot climate science denial and are unsure of how to respond, just direct them to one or more of these three sites. It reduces your cognitive load a lot. And, if you’re interested, you can learn about actual climate science in language you can understand.

Skeptical Science: systematically catalogs common climate denial myths and provides clear, referenced rebuttals at multiple technical levels, including non-science level.

NASA Climate: describes evidence and offers concise, visual, rigorously sourced explanations that directly undercut major climate science denial arguments about warming trends, causes, and projections.

US EPA Climate Change: provides plain-language explanations, data, and FAQs that debunk most standard climate science denial talking points by walking through the observational evidence and attribution science.

The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: BS, Lies and Crackpottery Are Easy, Debunking Is Hard

Context

One thing that many vocal supporters of Trump and MAGA politics have in common is an “allergy” to actual facts and sound reasoning. When presented with inconvenient information and sources, most of them reject the supporting information and reasoning out of hand. Some, with no stated reasons I’m aware of, absolutely refuse to even look at the source information. Apparently, they know their position is based mostly on falsehoods and crackpot arguments, i.e., logically flawed. Asserting falsehoods and crackpot reasoning is almost always fast, easy and fun. But, as some people here understand, explaining and debunking MAGA falsehoods and crackpottery takes a lot of time and effort. It’s not fast or easy, but it can still be fun!

A recent example of me wrestling with a crackpot argument is at these three links, link 1 (the crackpottery), link 2 (debunk, part 1), link 3 (debunk, part 2).

The Brandolini asymmetry principle

In January 2013, Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini watched former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi sparring with a journalist on an Italian political talk show. He just finished reading Daniel Kahneman’s masterpiece of cognitive biology, Thinking, Fast and Slow. From that collision of cognitive science with political theater, he distilled an observation into a single tweet that became known as Brandolini’s Law, or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. The Asymmetry Principle is simple: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that needed to produce it”. Yeah, but if it’s obvious in hindsight, why was no one saying it long before Brandolini? (link 4, link 5, link 6)

Anyway, the principle gave a name to was something people had long felt intuitively, namely that fabricating a false claim takes seconds, but dismantling it demands research, evidence, and careful argumentation. As Jonathan Swift observed centuries earlier, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it”. Brandolini simply quantified the asymmetry for the digital age. Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West of the University of Washington later built an entire university course and a book, Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, around this insight. They argued that unmanaged bullshit now saturates every corner of society and spreads across networks much the way diseases do. (link 7)

The asymmetry phenomenon is not just anecdotal. It is rooted in well-documented cognitive vulnerabilities. The illusory truth effect, first identified by psychologist Lynn Hasher and colleagues, demonstrates that simply repeating a false statement increases people’s perception that it is true, even when they previously knew it was incorrect. Each repetition exploits the brain’s tendency to mistake familiarity for accuracy. Research by Gordon Pennycook and David Rand at MIT found that susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy or crackpot thinking and partisan bias than sound reasoning. That kind of mindset usually fails to engage slow, hard analytic reasoning. Social science research indicates that people who are susceptible to pseudo-profound bullshit are significantly worse at distinguishing fake news from real news. Meanwhile, confirmation bias causes people to selectively seek and accept information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs, further insulating false claims from scrutiny. These cognitive shortcuts, e.g., familiarity heuristics, motivated reasoning, and unconscious open-mindedness to weak claims, constitute fertile ground for misinformation to take root with minimal effort from its creators. (link 8, link 9, link 10, link 11)

Research indicates that humans tend to spread false news more readily because it is usually to be more novel and emotionally arousing. That triggers reactions of surprise and emotions such as disgust or anger that drive spreading of falsehoods and crackpottery. By contrast on the debunking side, researchers have identified the continued influence effect of falsehoods/crackpottery even after a correction is issued and accepted. For better or worse, the original misinformation continues to shape people’s reasoning and memory. Researchers synthesized the findings in The Debunking Handbook 2020. That is a consensus document by 22 scholars detailing why effective debunking requires not just a retraction but a factual alternative explanation to fill the causal gap the myth once occupied. That task is far more time- and labor-intensive than the making up an original lie. (link 12, link 13, link 14)

The real-world stakes of asymmetry are enormous. The American Psychological Association asserts that people are more likely to believe misinformation when it comes from in-group sources. Nowadays, appeals to emotions like fear and outrage are easily manufactured on a large scale on social media. Vaccine misinformation alone cost an estimated $2 billion in preventable hospitalization costs and contributed to 45,000 avertable deaths in the United States in 2021. A 2019 University of Baltimore study estimated the global economic toll of fake news at roughly $78 billion per year in stock market losses, revenue declines, and reputational damage. Brandolini’s Law describes not just a rhetorical inconvenience but a structural vulnerability of democratic discourse and democracy itself. Bad-faith actors and ignorant people, can flood the information ecosystem with cheap shot lies and falsehoods. The liars know the truth but they also seem to know that truth will always be playing catch-up, which is a losing game. (link 15, link 16, link 17)

Conclusion

It takes some courage to confront people honestly, knowing that truth and sound reasoning are weaker than dishonest speech. It is much harder to debunk lies, slanders, crackpottery and all the rest of the rhetorical tools and tricks that demagogues have at their disposal. It just ain’t a fair fight. The human mind is rigged by evolution to give the advantage to the deceivers and their cynical, dishonest speech. But, people on the side of truth, sound reason and honest speech have no principled, honest choice but to play the hand nature and evolution gave us. If we loose, nearly all of us will be royally screwed by MAGA tyranny, ghastly corruption and arrogant cruelty.

MAGA's cynical, morally corrupt rewrite of social science and history

When MAGA is in charge, social science and history just ain't what they used to be. An Inside Higher Ed article, Florida Introduces ‘Sanitized’ Sociology Textbook, makes clear a false history that MAGA elites want to con everyone into false beliefs about human history. 

Florida MAGA officials rewrote an introductory sociology textbook for public universities. MAGA's version of sociology is packaged on a drastically shortened, “sanitized” textbook that strips out core sociological content. Information about race, gender, sexuality, inequality and systemic power are mostly gone. For the course to retain “general education” status  in the Florida university system, this MAGA propaganda has to be used as the primary textbook. 

The new MAGA-approved textbook is a heavily edited version of an open-source Introduction to Sociology 3e. It is cut from 669 pages to 267 pages. Entire chapters on media and technology, global inequality, race and ethnicity, social stratification, and gender, sex and sexuality simply vanished. A section on government-led genocide of Native Americans was removed. Use of the term “transgender” drops from 68 uses to one, and “racism” from 115 uses to six. All discussion of systemic or structural racism, which faculty describe as a core concept of the field, is deleted in its entirety.  

Legal impetus for MAGA's perversion of history and sociology comes Florida’s 2023 Senate Bill 266. That law bans general-education courses from teaching “identity politics,” “distorting” historical events, or using theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in U.S. institutions. State MAGA politicians have cynically attacked sociology as ideologically “hijacked,” “mushy,” and lacking the kind of academic rigor they falsely claim to want. This is just part of MAGA's broader attempt to hide, deny or delegitimize inconvenient sociology and history.

Death of democracy by thousands of cuts

Trump's grifter nominee for 

Surgeon General

The obscure example of the grifter Surgeon General

Trump recently nominated Casey Means as surgeon general, America’s top public‑health messenger. She is grossly unqualified for the job, but Trump likes her style. Means is a physician who left surgical training to become a wellness influencer and entrepreneur, building a brand on warning people not to trust mainstream doctors and promoting “root‑cause” health products and protocols with scant evidence. Reporting notes that she has sold supplements and other wellness products, aligned with anti‑vaccine figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She allowed her medical license to lapse, even as she positions herself as a visionary who sees through “corrupt” conventional medicine. This obscure personnel move captures the larger catastrophic transition. The United States is drifting from flawed but mostly rule‑bound democracy toward a more openly corrupt, propaganda‑driven, authoritarian politics. That accelerating trend tracks closely with Trump’s rise since 2016. (link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4)

Trump’s nomination of Means reflects the broader MAGA demagoguery pattern. Sophisticated grifters and cranks who thrive on misinformation, crackpottery and conspiratorial rhetoric are elevated because they weaponize distrust of institutions and expertise. Her message that doctors and public‑health institutions are fundamentally untrustworthy fits with a media ecosystem where “disinformation doctors” exploit professional credentials to spread vaccine and other falsehoods, often for fame, power or profit. Public‑health experts now warn that coordinated health misinformation erodes trust, worsens outcomes, and makes it far easier for political demagogues to present themselves as lone truth‑tellers against a system that demagogues falsely claim is rigged and malevolent. (link 2, link 5, link 6)

The problem for democracy from too much distrust

American democracy depends on a critical mass of people believing that facts exist, that expertise is real, and that institutions, though imperfect, are at least somewhat accountable. Today that belief is being steadily hollowed out by a tidal wave of propaganda that intentionally blurs the line between truth and grift. Research on recent U.S. elections shows that systematic disinformation—amplified by social media and foreign and domestic actors—has fueled false beliefs about fraud, depressed confidence in vote counting, and deepened polarization. At the same time, broad public trust in the federal government has been stuck below 30 percent for nearly two decades, with recent readings in the teens and single digits for many groups. (link 7, link 8, link 9)

This trust collapse creates an opening for three interlocking flavors of kleptocratic authoritarianism. First, a personalized Trumpist dictatorship uses executive power for self‑protection and revenge, following the global pattern of “executive aggrandizement” that weakens oversight, attacks independent institutions, and normalizes election denialism. Second, a billionaire‑corporate oligarchy leverages deregulation, dark money, and captured media to tilt policy toward a tiny donor class, a trend supercharged by the Citizens United decision and subsequent campaign‑finance rulings. Third, a Christian nationalist project seeks to entrench minority rule under the banner of “taking back” a Christian nation, using structural biases like the Senate and Electoral College to impose the values of a shrinking faction on a diverse public. (link 10, link 11, link 12, link 13, link 14)

Conclusion

All three major strands of American authoritarianism now vying for long-term power, dictatorship, oligarchy and fundamentalist Christian theocracy, depend on the same dishonest information strategy. All three knowingly train people to distrust accountable expertise and democratic institutions while embracing charismatic figures who weaponize grievance and identity to deceive the public. Years of radical‑right demagoguery and organized disinformation have changed the mental environment that Americans live in. That has made sophisticated propaganda and organized grift feel normal and even virtuous to far too many Americans. They are deceived and betrayed. The Means nomination is just one corrupt, authoritarian cut among thousands. It exemplifies how far we’ve fallen when Trump’s morally depraved authoritarian government, awash in public‑health and democratic crises, selects as the nation’s doctor, a dishonest crackpot grifter whose career was built on persuading the public that its doctors cannot be trusted. (link 15, link 2)