There's something in our air that's making us sick - fatigue, eye problems, inability to concentrate, headaches, obesity, even cognitive declines to name just a few symptoms. What's more, this health hazard is increasing at an alarming rate and researchers and doctors are only now beginning to understand just how much trouble we might be in. What is causing all these problems and is there anything we can do to fix it? Join us this week as we explore this rarely reported health risk in "Last Gasp."
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[0:00] I'm David Torcivia.
I'm Daniel Forkner.
[0:03] And this is Ashes Ashes, a podcast about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky, maybe even the end of the world.
[0:13] But if we learn from all this maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[0:20] This week we've got a very special show on a topic that is vitally important to all of our health, but seems to get very little attention both from the media and the medical community as a whole.
[0:30] Now that's beginning to change as the magnitude of this threat is becoming apparent and we're finally getting some sort of scientific consensus around this.
A lot of what we're going to discuss still sounds sort of controversial, so we've really gone out of our way this week to source a bunch of high-quality studies in journals and sources on our website ashesashes.org.
But more on that in a minute. To start we're going to take a look at something else and then ease into this story. So Daniel you want to give it a shot?
[0:56] From 1960 to the early 90s crime rates were increasing dramatically in New York City and this is a story that gets retold often; murder had gone up by a factor of 5.
Rape had quadrupled in this time period. But then crime started to plummet.Murder dropped by 50% over three years from ‘93 to ‘96, and by 2010 violent crime in New York had decreased by 75% since it had peaked in the early 90s.
[1:27] A lot of theories have been put forward to try to explain both this dramatic increase in violent crime and its subsequent decrease.
The New York mayor Giuliani took credit with his strict police tactics; drug enforcers blamed the crack pandemic.
And some have even theorized that the biggest driver of crime has always been the number of young males in the population, and that legalized abortion was responsible for curbing violent crime. And none of these theories have been particularly compelling; crime had already decreased by 12% when Giuliani took office and there was an increase in young men throughout the 90s and early 2000s as the baby boomer generation grew up, but crime continue to decline in that period. And it's also important to point out that while New York City got the most attention, similar trends were happening all over the country.
[2:19] Is there any idea to what actually caused this first, radical increase and later mysterious decrease in crime?
[2:25] There actually is and it's a little bit startling and it kind of comes out of left field; it's not something you would expect.
So in the early 90s the US Department of Housing and Urban Development asked this consultant to study the benefits of removing lead-based paint from older houses. There was research that showed not only does lead exposure in children lead to low IQ, hyperactivity, and learning disabilities but also there was a link between childhood exposure to lead and juvenile delinquency rates later on in life.
[2:58] So you're saying lead, the toxic metal that they banned from all sorts of things, might have been responsible for this crime wave?
[3:04] That's right and it does sound unbelievable at first but this consultant, he took crime data all over the country and he correlated it with lead exposure; the biggest exposure of lead came from gasoline. Leaded gasoline was very popular starting in the forties and it peaked in the seventies when they figured out that “oh this is actually pretty harmful we need to get rid of this.”
And what they found is that there was an extremely, almost perfect, correlation between lead exposure nationally and the crime rates as long as there was a 23-year lag in the statistics.
And since then - he came out with this paper in 2000 it didn't get a lot of attention - but a lot of research has come out since then that shows even stronger correlations in different countries, at the city level, and in 2016 a paper came out that even showed that you could pinpoint this correlation on the neighborhood level; as long as there was an increase in lead exposure, there was an increase in violent crime 23 years later and the decrease was also true.
[4:03] Okay so for me to summarize quickly what you're saying is this environmental variable, something that was basically pumped out into the air all around us, your exposure to this toxin really, would have profound effects on your likelihood to become a criminal later in life. And even more than that I guess also things like you mentioned IQ, I’ve read things about aggression as well as ADHD and some other thoughts that it might be contributing to this which causes that Juvenile and later on adult delinquency. That's interesting.
[4:33] Well yeah and it would be hard to believe if we could just say “look there's a correlation between lead exposure and crime 23 years later,” even if it was really drilled down and really specific in different time periods, and different location, and at different rates because it's just so unusual right? But neurological research demonstrates that even very little exposures to lead in young children can seriously and permanently reduce IQ, and that the physical damage to children's brains, the development that harms persist into adulthood.
High childhood exposure damages a part of the brain that's linked to aggression control like you mentioned. And this high exposure to lead during childhood was linked to a permanent loss of brain matter in the prefrontal cortex, part of the brain that is associated with aggression control, emotional regulation, the ability to control your impulses, attention, your verbal reasoning, and all types of mental flexibility that goes into interacting with humans in a normal way.
[5:33] It's interesting too that you bring this up, I've always heard this study in context of inner-city youth. Especially because that's where most of this lead was positioned because that's where the most traffic was; inner-city youth is also a coded word for like minorities right? So this is “Oh yeah lead is what caused these minorities, primarily African-Americans, to cause his crime wave” or whatever.
But part of me also wonders while we're talking about this, and I haven't seen any research suggesting this or anything, but maybe it wasn't just these inner-city youths; a lot of our politicians, and CEOs, and other people who have strange aggression and other problems that sounds like what you just listed off, were also affected by this but took their crimes out more on all of us rather than individuals, and escaped the criminal justice system but instead are now leading our country?
I don’t know I’m reaching a little bit here but maybe that's something to think about for researchers out there.
[6:28] That is really interesting, and that is a sad component right, is that these minority groups that were already at a disadvantage, they were already on the margins of being successful in society, it's very likely that this lead exposure just pushed them down even further and prevented them from really participating in society and being labeled as criminals for reasons that were outside of their control and yeah, everyone would have been affected by this exposure so you're right those coming from more wealthy families or better protected by their social communities, could still have had these profound effects on their aggression control, on their impulses, and there's no telling how that could have been impacting society over the past several decades.
[7:07] Okay so this is a very interesting story and something we could spend a whole episode on exploring just by itself, but it's actually not the focus of what we're looking at here today, but we really wanted to look at something that had a lot of statistical confirmation showing you that these environmental factors that are in the air around us can have profound effects on her health and the way that we act, and every single part of our lives, both from an individual level up to societal. So this is our segue into the top of that we’re going to talk about today, but research on this also started getting underway in the late 70s early 80s right when people were realizing “wait lead is bad for us in gasoline.”
At the same time there was this big surge of building office buildings and stuff right, so lots of people were suddenly working in offices, there were all these white collar jobs, and we really saw this surge of productivity that aligned with the development of electronics in the office, that really created this sort of office space in a way that we haven't seen before, and a lot of these new constructions, these new buildings, people started getting sick in them. They had all sorts of weird problems like headaches, they had respiratory problems, inability to concentrate, eye problems, all sorts of things that anybody has been in a building that feels you know stuffy has suffered from it at times and this became a big health problem.
[8:16] They didn't really know what was causing it either so they just labeled it Sick Building Syndrome which I think is pretty creative and kind of funny.
[8:23] It was the World Health Organization that actually named it that which is kind of funny coming from a major health group.
[8:29] I'm going to call my boss and tell him I can't come into work because I've got the Sick Building Syndrome.
[8:33] Yeah we'll see if that one works.
But anyway so the sick building syndrome, or SPS, they realized it was only isolated to these actual buildings and as soon as people would leave, all the symptoms and stuff would disappear. If you took a weekend off or went on vacation, all of a sudden you’d feel much better.
So the question became “there’s something in these buildings causing this but what is it?” There's a lot of theories that were thrown out. Toxic mold was a very popular one, they thought it was poor ventilation, weird things coming off people, they weren't sure but eventually they were able to narrow it down and they found that it was something about the air. They identified a number of pollutants and things that are in all of our air all the time, and they said “well it’s one of these things that’s causing this but we're not sure” and so some of the culprits were volatile organic compounds or VOCs, particulate matter, formaldehyde, things that when you're tracking pollution now we still point to as these are the harmful things causing pollution.
And yes, all these things are bad for us it's absolutely true, but a lot of the physiological effects they were seeing still haven't been tied to any of these chemicals or causes and so the big question was like “well it’s one of these things, maybe they interact, but as long as we keep the buildings well ventilated the problem goes away.” The way they tracked that ventilation to see you know “are we getting enough fresh air in here” was by tracking CO2, the carbon dioxide that we breathe out.
[9:53] So by measuring the CO2 that's in the air you get a kind of like a litmus test for what else is in the air right?
[9:59] Yeah that's a good example. I mean the way CO2 works is there's not a lot of it in the air naturally, though that is increasing all the time which we’ll get to in a minute. But as just like air around us, the CO2 level’s very low; it's less than 1%.
[10:12] But we actively exhale CO2. So in the process of breathing and in the respiration system that we have that enables us to survive, we take in oxygen right, and that oxygen binds with stuff and it generates energy, and the byproduct of that energy - the two main by-products are carbon dioxide and water.
And we exhale that carbon dioxide into the air so if aid starts off 20% oxygen, we breathe out 15% oxygen and 5% carbon dioxide.
[10:36] And so this process as we sit in the room inside, as we breathe more and more it starts filling with carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide becomes a very good measure of how good is the ventilation in this room.
If the room is well ventilated then the carbon dioxide level should stay the same as it is outside.
[10:50] So as we breathe out CO2 in our office buildings and our spaces, it's a good indicator of how well the building is ventilated right because we're putting a lot of CO2 in the air so if it starts to accumulate you know that the building is not very well ventilated because it's not being flushed out and replaced by air from the outside.
[11:07] Yeah exactly so we breathe out a lot of CO2 actually, it adds up quite a bit especially if you have a lot of people in the same room. A single person can emit up to 23 liters of CO2 per hour, and if you're doing physical activity that can dramatically increase by as much as 8 or even 10 times.
[11:24] So this thing becomes a very good marker of how fresh air is and how much air is mixed with the outside because the outside air has very low parts per million, that's the measure of CO2 level. So we exhale CO2 at 50,000 parts per million, and the background level of CO2 in the air outside has been increasing over the past hundred and so years because of pollution and the greenhouse gases and burning all this fossil fuel and stuff, but it's now a little over 400 - it's about 406 parts per million - and it varies according to the season.
[11:56] That increase has happened just over the last 150 years since industrialization right? I mean throughout human history we evolved at CO2 levels less than 300 parts per million.
[12:08] So this elevated CO2 level is a very new and recent phenomenon in the long terms of human history and in human health.
Up until just a few generations ago like you said the average background CO2 level was 280 maybe 300 in a particularly bad area.
We’ve increased dramatically you know by over 1/3 in just the past 100 - 150 years and if things continue the same way they are right now, we might see that increase even more dramatically by the end of the century where instead of 400 parts per million, we might seem as high as 800 parts per million outside.
Which might have some profound effects and we'll talk about that in a little bit.
But you mentioned that we evolved primarily under this 280 parts per million background CO2 level, and that's interesting because this is the level our human physiologies evolved for this; is where we operate at peak capacity so to say.
[12:57] And because we evolved in an environment with a lower level of CO2 I'm guessing there are some negative consequences when that CO2 level rises.
[13:06] So CO2 isn’t just a waste product, it actually has a lot of important functions in our body.
So for example this is one of the most interesting things: we detect how much air, how much oxygen we need to breathe, not by measuring the oxygen that we’re taking in but actually in how much carbon dioxide that were exhaling. Getting rid of this waste from our system is what keeps control of how much oxygen that we're breathing in, and the body automatically regulates this so if you're breathing out too little CO2, you’re going to be breathing too little oxygen. If you breathe out too much CO2 you’re going to be trying to breathe more and more oxygen to compensate. There's a big regulatory effect and it goes from there much deeper than that too. So CO2 is absorbed into our blood - and this is part of from the blood is transported into our lungs and exhaled from there - but in the process of doing that they also increases the acidity of our blood. This lower pH blood has a lot of effects on her body.
[13:58] Too much CO2 in our bodies can cause our blood pH levels to decrease like you said David, which increases the acidity and this can trigger all kinds of things in our bodies like tremors, headaches, hyperventilation, visual impairment, breathing issues, we’ll experience dizziness, and problems with concentration. So there are a lot of bad effects from too much CO2 in our blood.
[14:23] These conditions - it actually has a medical term called hypercapnia - and typically that's only used to refer to very high levels like 10,000 parts per million, 40,000 parts per million, which is when it starts getting very very dangerous. At 40,000 parts per million you start having these things become life-threatening; 50,000 parts per million you're basically a drunk person; 70000 parts per million you pass out, and at 90,000 parts per million you’re dead within minutes.
But wait, wait, let's go back to that symptom list and look at that again, what were those again Daniel?
[14:53] Tremors, headaches, hyperventilation, visual impairment, breathing issues, dizziness, problems concentrating, reduced fertility, reduced cognitive ability, increase blood pressure, and erratic behavior to name a few.
[15:08] Some of those sound kind of familiar what were… if we go back to those Sick Building Syndrome things, I think I remember headaches, visual impairment, dizziness, problems concentrating, wait a second… these things seem to be linked!
Could it be, could it be that it's actually CO2, this benign marker of poor ventilation that's the thing actually causing all these problems?
[15:32] Well it turns out a lot of researchers would say yes.
And this is a hypothesis that has really only become popular in the past 10 years, there's a lot of research that still needs to be done, there's a huge lack of research on long-term effects of CO2, but there is clear evidence that short-term exposure to higher levels of CO2 does produce those symptoms that we just mentioned, and also a lot of other things that we should be concerned about like cognitive function.
[15:57] Okay well so let's start looking at some numbers here to figure out exactly what we're talking about. So when you say short-term exposure what does that mean?
[16:06] Short-term exposure would be, you go into the office building for your 9 to 5 and you experience higher than normal levels of CO2. So this could be an 8-hour workday for example. But it could be as short as 2 hours; that would be a short-term exposure where you would still see some of these symptoms happen.
[16:22] You say there's very little studies done on mid or long-term effects. Mid-term meaning a year or two, which is I think the longest studies that have been done in this area.
[16:33] Yeah there were a couple of mid-range studies that were carried; out one was by NASA to see the effects of CO2 on astronauts in space, and one was carried out to recommend CO2 levels in submarines, but none of these studies were actually very long.
[16:47] And they're also, I mean if it's astronauts and like US Navy submariners, these are people that are very healthy in like the prime of their lives, so I don't know how much it can carry over to the rest of us either.
[16:59] So let's talk about the levels that we experience everyday.
[17:02] Yeah okay so like we said we've established that outside, our background CO2 is about 406 part per million, and it varies from day to day, and seasons and stuff, but that's a good base level background CO2 level. So if you walked outside that's what you would get.
I have a bunch of CO2 meters because I've been following this with interest for several years now; I have one sitting on my desk right now. I'm in a well-ventilated room in a big apartment by myself at the moment, and because it's just one person in here I'm the only thing out-putting CO2, and my CO2 levels are sitting here at 575 parts per million which is considered very, very good.
[17:39] In Office Buildings 1000 parts per million is the kind of recommended standard, but that's on the low side and many Office Buildings will get up to much higher than that, and OSHA actually sets the upper limit to 5000 parts per million.
[17:53] Which was a number that was come to in large part because of those studies on those submarines.
Okay so office buildings are 1000 or 2500 parts per million, schools are another place where we spend a lot of our time, maybe not so much anymore but when we’re growing up we do, and especially these are kids in the developing part of their lives; their brains are actively growing and changing every day, so this is a very important time in their lives.
A large study was done - this is actually one of the only large CO2 studies that has really been done by a government organization in the past 10 years - by the state of Texas among some other groups - there’re some other studies done in Europe - on school levels to see what kids are putting up with day to day.
And they found something like over 60% of classrooms had above 1000 parts per million CO2, with a large part being above 2500 parts per million, and the most extreme classrooms reaching as high as 6000 parts per million, even above those OSHA standards.
[18:47] And that's a little concerning because the sick building syndrome symptoms that we listed earlier, these headaches and things like this, the symptoms are actually a little bit more pronounced in children. So at around that 1000 parts per million level, you know children will experience lower levels of concentration, sneezing, and symptoms of asthma. And these levels of CO2 can have a big impact on students ability to concentrate, and learn, to take tests; it effects their attention and their memory, and all types of things that are important to their academic performance.
[19:17] I mean I know growing up in school and again later in college, especially those large lecture halls, you have those days when you're sitting there and you just can't concentrate, you’re falling asleep, you feel like you have no idea what's going on you just want to… you’re jittery in your seat you want to get out of there. And you know a lot of times we blame that on “kids are bored, they’re not interested in the topic” or “oh you just want to get out of here and do something else.”
Or we’re even beginning to see like a lot of doctors come in and say you know “oh this kid has ADHD let's get them on Ritalin, let's get him on” whatever it is that they're prescribing to children these days because they can't concentrate.
When in fact a lot of that may just be because these CO2 levels are too high and it's causing a cognitive change in these children making it impossible to focus.
[20:00] I always thought that I had trouble concentrating in class because I had been drinking the night before, but now I know that it wasn't my fault it was just the CO2 in the air.
[20:09] I hope you're talking about college and not your other schools.
[20:15] And this has profound effects both on children and then also on those office workers that we talked about as well, but these aren't the only places CO2 levels are very high.
We see them a lot in public transportation for example. Airliners are routinely over 2000 parts per million; buses above 2500 parts per million.
I've actually made this myself on trains, I've seen anywhere from 800 parts per million to above 2000 parts per million.
And cars, wow. A car by yourself is obviously - especially if you have the air running on that recycle mode where you’re not bringing outside stuff like when it's cold or when it's very hot outside – you’re just basically sitting in there breathing out all the CO2 and just sitting in it like a like a bath. And very quickly within minutes of sitting in the car by yourself, that car will be above 2000 parts per million. If you have several people in that car, I've seen study saying that 4 or 5 people in the car will put you above 10,000 parts per million, which causes acute dangerous effects - this is starting to get into the danger zone - within 25, 30 minutes.
When you're on these long drives and stuff, we've all felt tired, inability to concentrate and stuff, which again you know it might not just be that road hypnotism that we think about but also the actual CO2 that we’re putting out in this car that is making it difficult to concentrate on the road ahead of us, putting both ourselves and other people at danger.
[21:29] One that you might not expect but it's kind of alarming is that if you wear a motorcycle helmet, you could be experiencing up to 20,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air that you're breathing even while you're moving.
And the last thing we need is people driving a motorcycle with decreased concentration and headaches and all that good stuff.
[21:46] Okay so we've established these levels are very high right? These things are getting into the area where researchers are concerned, where doctors are considering, saying “okay this is going to start having an effect on different abilities of us to do something.”
So the concern here is as background levels of CO2 increases, then the ability for us to ventilate these places and get these CO2 levels down to a reasonable safe zone, which we know is below 1000 parts per million, and they might be much lower than that and we'll talk more about that in a moment, it becomes more difficult because that outside air that we use to level and normalize the background CO2 of the indoor air becomes much higher itself, and so this differential gets smaller and it's harder to jettison this excess CO2.
Let's talk about some other effects.
[22:31] Obviously it sucks to get headaches and things like that, but researchers did notice that some of these sick building syndrome symptoms were possibly linked to CO2 and so they started doing some research.
And one of the big things that has come out is that moderately increased levels of CO2 have profound impacts on our cognitive functions. A 2012 study from Berkeley, repeated in a larger 2015 study from Harvard, found some darling things.
Using a baseline of 600 parts per million as a raw score for this testing that they did, they found that when CO2 rose to about 1000 parts per million, they saw an 11 to 23% decrease in cognitive functions and their participants.
When it got up to 2500 parts per million, which is again common in schools and poorly ventilated buildings like we mentioned, you saw a 44 to 94% decrease in cognition. These effects were most pronounced in these activity levels of crisis response, which is your ability to make decisions under emergency situation; information usage; and strategy which, is your ability to plan, prioritize, and sequence actions.
[23:39] Let's pause for a moment here because this is when this story goes from like “yes CO2 is concerning,” to like “oh wait we might all be fucked.” So just to summarize this study again because I think it really deserves repeating these numbers because they're so shocking.
So a raw score - the baseline score of 600 parts per million, which is higher than what we've evolved under, that's double the carbon dioxide levels that we are used to existing under as a human species - so 1000 parts per million which is considered again as a very good level in an office building or in a school, we saw as high as a 23% decrease in cognitive ability.
23%. That’s humongous okay. That wipes out any sort of gains that we've made in terms of IQ, or intelligence, or whatever it is over the past you know century from our improved nutrition and health and whatever.
[24:28] Remember that 1000 parts per million is the standard goal for buildings.
[24:33] Right. And so 2500 parts per million, which is a number that is not uncommon to find especially in older buildings with poor ventilation and in almost every school.
A 44 to 94% decrease in these cognitive test.
That's humongous okay, so I mean let's just look for a moment at kids. They are trying to learn and do all sorts of very difficult cognitive tasks in the environment that's making it almost impossible for them to do that. It might be so like every individual has a little variability and how they respond to these heightened CO2 levels; some of us are more sensitive than others.
The collective former wisdom has always been like “oh some people are naturally good test-takers and some people aren’t.”
When we start looking at the CO2 levels and this data, it might actually mean that “I'm not just a good test-taker, I'm just more resistant to heightened CO2 levels than someone else is.” And it's just that natural genetic quirk of my body that enables me to score higher on these tests and therefore have that whole trickle-down effect on the rest of my life; I can go to a better College, I can get scholarships, and I live a better life because the CO2 levels in my classroom were higher and I was able to resist it better than somebody else.
[25:41] This is a humongous failing of our Educational Systems and on a larger scale in terms of business, I mean if any entrepreneurs out there are listening: imagine you could come up with a device - a very simple device the technology already exists for - carbon dioxide scrubbers, and you bring this device to businesses and you say “I've got a little box right here, plug it in and you can subscribe to my scrubbing thing’s weekly or monthly or whatever it is and it will increase the productivity of your workers 22 to 50%.”
If that's not a billion-dollar idea I don't know what is, so somebody take that and send me a check.
But this is a humongous groundbreaking study; it's so important, and so impressive than NASA is actively looking at their former 5000 parts per million guidelines, which astronauts were already complaining about headaches and others other things under these levels, and NASA’s saying you know “what? With these cognitive ability research coming out, we might have fucked up, and we need to way decrease our parts per million because this might be having profound effects on our astronauts and their ability to complete their missions in a safe and efficient manner.”
So again this is a 600 parts per million baseline right? If you look at the IPCC reports for climate change and stuff we might be facing 800 parts per million outside, natural baseline, by the end of the century. That means this raw score of 600 isn't even going to be possible. Indoors, we're not going to be looking at 1,000 parts per million which is double and then some of the outside, but the inside world will be 1500 Parts million. As a good ventilated area.
[27:13] That has humongous effects on the ability of our species, of the human race, to deal with all these climate change problems as they come up and we are at the same time decreasing our cognitive ability to handle all these problems.
[27:27] Yeah that's the big thing that sticks out to me is: on the one hand, I hate to imagine that I personally am experiencing this 30, 40, 50% decline in my cognitive functions when I'm operating in a building.
And that kind of sucks for me as an individual, but when those effects occur in every individual throughout Society, you’re looking at 40% decline in cognitive functions of society as a whole.
That has huge implications for our ability to progress into the future right? And especially when you're talking about children that are growing up in these high concentrated schools that are having trouble concentrating and are maybe not developing intellectually and educationally the way that we really need them to be.
[28:11] Yeah well that's a huge gap in our knowledge right now too, there are literally no studies and I’ve spent days and days looking for this. There are no studies done on the long-term effects of CO2 on developing minds, so we just have to throw our hands up in the air and say “we have no idea what this is doing to our children, we have no idea how developing minds are affected by these extremely high CO2 levels that we've never seen before in human history” because these very airtight buildings are a very recent invention in terms of the long history of humanity.
This is a brand new problem and this is something that you know we might be looking at in a couple of decades as important as that lead issue, or cigarettes, or something else.
[28:50] And I've kind of been wondering why is there such a lack of research in this area? CO2 is a very known molecule in the air that we associate with global climate change, but there is no long-term research like you said on the effects of the human brain, or our ability to function.
One suggestion that one researcher put forth as a possible reason why we’re lacking this research, is because for however bad CO2 levels get indoors, we can always just walk outside, breathe fresh air, and normalize our system right? But like you said we're facing a world where outdoor CO2 levels are rising and we may get to a point when the research finally does catch up, we realize “oh no, we don't want outside ambient air to get X concentration but it's too late we're already there.”
[29:40] And that's the really scary part of this is when we get to this, it’s not just a matter of like taking lead out of gasoline, like we were able to do in the 70s, or banning chlorofluorocarbons for the ozone stuff.
This is a very important part of not just climate change and the greenhouse gas effect, but also of our health as a race.
But we have more stuff, there’s more things that CO2 is doing to us, I don't want us to get too distracted so let’s keep pushing on on these other horrible, horrible stuff this heightened carbon dioxide is doing to all of our bodies.
[30:11] Let's keep the bad news flowing.
[30:13] Yeah that's our motto here.
[30:15] Okay yeah so let's look at some other effects that CO2 might be having on as a society and as individuals.
Research has shown that CO2 may be linked to the rise in obesity in our society, and also the poor quality of our sleep and our appetite. We also know that CO2 levels are associated with kidney failure and osteoporosis.
Anxiety could be another thing that's hugely impacted by CO2 levels in the blood, and this is still speculative research, but there was a study done on mice that found that when mice were exposed to a high concentration of CO2 it caused these classic fear behavior symptoms in mice. You know the types of symptoms that you would normally associate with panic attacks and extreme anxiety.
[30:59] And it's this idea that part of the brain's response to CO2 levels is this kind of, you know, suffocation alarm. If there's too much CO2 in your blood it must mean that you're in an area of low oxygen, and it creates this fear response and many people.
And so everyone has different thresholds, and this idea that there could be a lot of people who have lower thresholds of CO2 in the blood that creates this suffocation alarm in the brain which leads to panic attacks and extreme anxiety. And I know personally I have friends, and I know people who have panic attacks, and they’ll tell you that there's no logical reason for it. It just comes on sometimes and it can be extremely debilitating.
And it's possible that a large part of the anxiety in our society is being driven by these high concentrations of CO2.
[31:46] There's also, so CO2, and for this one there's a little bit of controversy here when I was looking into this.
But we have these things called reactive oxygen species, which I'm not going to get into but you medically trained listeners know what I'm talking about.
The short version of it is these are chemicals like peroxide and stuff that generate in your body that causes damage to your cells and at some level to the DNA itself.
These reactive oxygen species, or ROS, are associated with a lot of diseases like diabetes, arterial sclerosis, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, anything that has a lot of inflammation in it is often linked to this. And there's a lot of evidence that CO2 exacerbates this problem and makes these ROS more toxic. I've also found some research that suggests that CO2 higher levels actually decrease the amount of ROS generated, but the stuff that is generated might increase toxicity, and the concern with some of these researchers is that as we have more carbon dioxide in our blood and in the air around us, that we make these chemicals worse and we'll see an increase in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, chronic inflammation, diabetes, which you know wait a second, those are all diseases that are exploding right now along with obesity. Along with anxiety.
So again we see all these symptoms that CO2 is linked to - these diseases that it's linked to - that are exploding in our society around us at the same time that CO2 levels are growing at a rate that's never been seen before basically in all of recorded history as far back as geology can go.
[33:13] One of the big gaps in this research like we said is the long-term effects, and the reason why that's concerning is because when CO2 rises in our body, and it increases the acidity, we have compensatory mechanisms in our body that try to regulate that pH level back up to its normal level.
The kidney plays a huge role in doing that, and when these mechanisms are forced to remain active over long periods of time they start to break down, and we don't really understand all of the long-term effects of that.
I mean we do know that the kidney will work to regulate the pH level of our blood, and if it has to continue doing that eventually that stops, and when the kidney stops performing this mechanism our body steals carbonates from our bones in order to regulate the pH level which can lead to osteoporosis.
[33:58] And so the question becomes then “at what levels does the CO2 need to be at before our body is constantly compensating, and we see these prolonged constant streams of our bodies trying to generate and fight the CO2 off?” And there's been almost no research done on this, I was only able to find a single paper that mentioned it, and it posits that this click-over state, because there’s a linear relationship to CO2 levels and the pH level of our blood, without the compensatory affects our body does, we start getting serious acidosis around 430 parts per million. So that seems to be the trigger point of when the body says “okay I need to start compensating,” and activating these other mechanisms to get this pH level back up to where it needs to be.
So 430 parts per million, we lived most of human history under 280 parts per million, and now we’re 406; we’re increasing several parts per million every year, so we’re half a decade out, maybe a decade, of being at 430 parts per million all the time; of our bodies being constantly compensating for this heightened CO2 levels, all around us and in our blood.
What effects that will have on us long-term, like Daniel mention osteoporosis, there's some big concerns about kidney failure over a very long studies. In fact the US Navy identified this as a serious place that they needed to look at in terms of long-term effects to their sailors on these submarines, but then that study was never followed up on - that was in the late 80s and they haven't done anything since then. This might be a serious problem.
[35:26] The reason there is lacking of research on these long-term effects could be because we can just walk outside and get a breath of fresh air, and what you're saying is we could be experiencing CO2 levels outside, that trigger these mechanisms in our body.
[35:40] Yeah exactly where there is no respite, where there is no rest, where your body is constantly compensating for these elevated carbon dioxide levels. Where we live in a constant state of stress as we try and manage the pH level of our blood to something where it's supposed to be - where it had been evolving over millions of years at 280 parts per million, and suddenly we are constantly trying to fight that.
[36:00] That sounds stressful.
[36:01] That has profound effects on the long-term health of our body, and obviously with the cognitive effects and other problems we mentioned throughout this episode.
[36:08] And I mean the IPCC does recognize that CO2 could pose a health danger, but because of this lack of research and the fact that they place more significance on CO2 as a driver of global climate change, they basically don't address it as a serious need for concern.
Which means that a lot of countries and researchers who maybe should be spending a little bit more time researching this may not be incentivize to.
[36:34] Okay so we've identified there's no research being done on the long-term studies; there's no research being done on developmental effects; and it doesn't seem like the scientific community at large is particularly concerned about this outside the productivity nature of this right? So the only studies being done at the moment are “how does this affect our workers? Are they not being able to think well enough in the office place?” and so maybe we should we need to redefine our priorities here and say well “this is a dramatic health concern for society at large, for all of human health, and we need to look at this not just in terms of how is this affecting workers in office places, but how is this going to affect the long-term health of all of humans; of humanity?”
[37:12] But it’s not just humanity right? I mean we touched in the last episode about deoxygenation in the ocean having huge impacts on marine life, and I guess I'm wondering how this could be affecting other animals as well.
[37:25] Yeah I mean studies have been done.
They found particularly fish are highly susceptible to these higher CO2 levels, which you’re right does tie into the episode we did last week, and it causes anxiety, it causes weird behavior and stuff, and we’re seeing this already like now, especially with animals that are smaller than us that have difficulty offloading this excess CO2 waste that our larger bodies are able to cope with.
Every single thing on this Earth that breathes oxygen is facing these problems, and we're just beginning to understand the effects some of these might have in changing the behavior of everything. So I mean if this affects the anxiety of humans, if this affects our decision-making, if this affects our anger response - which is something we’ve seen some hypercapnia stuff, then it might very well be doing the same thing to animals, even pets. Right? So our dogs, our cats are affected by this. I'd be very interested in seeing some research done to see if measurable increases in changes of animal behavior that could be tied to these increased CO2 levels, and I guess we'll be really finding out if that's the case over the next decade or two as the CO2 level really starts jumping and we see those parts per million climb, much much faster all the time.
[38:36] For the lead story, we did notice that lead was a problem in society; leaded gasoline was the main culprit in terms of exposure, and we replaced that with unleaded gasoline. And yeah lead is still around, it’s still a huge health risk; there's a lot of lead in paint in older houses that people get exposed to when they renovate; there’s still lead in soil that gets kicked up in certain times of the year in different places. But a large part we've been able to remove that as an immediate threat to us. But CO2 in the air is a lot harder to get rid of.
[39:11] Right which is why the focus on reducing greenhouse emissions has been just on that: on reducing emissions. Although the IPCC 2 Celsius goal does have plans for carbon capture and sequestration, which is literally sucking this carbon dioxide out of the air and burying it in the ground using a variety of mechanisms, but that technology really doesn't exist it yet and when it does exist it’s not at scale and it's far too expensive to be practical.
(Even though we're supposed to have had it running for a couple years now but who's counting?)
So without this magical CCS technology we're stuck with the carbon dioxide that’s in the air and it's only getting worse. Every time you drive your car, every time you do anything that burns these fossil fuels: you purchase a product that's made with these fossil fuels - which is by the way everything.
We are contributing to this problem and sealing our fate into the future and there's no easy way to just stop it and pull it out of the environment and get away from it like we had with lead.
[40:07] So we should be encouraging more research in this area; the long-term effects of CO2, and we should use things like this as even more incentive to reduce our carbon emissions and look in to potentially some of these technologies for sequestering carbon dioxide out of the air.
[40:24] And I can see a future that has these carbon scrubbers in, you know, every classroom, in every workplace, maybe even our beds at night. Hopefully it doesn't get to that point but it wouldn't surprise me if a decade or two from now that we definitely see this.
[40:38] But as individuals I think there are things we can do right now. I mean, next time you're in a building and you're starting to feel a little bit drowsy, maybe you have a headache.
Maybe go outside, take a walk, you know, take a breather. I mean we have air outside that's a lot fresher than the air that's in a lot of our poorly ventilated buildings, and we should take advantage of it. Appreciate the air that is right now freely available and still in relatively good quality.
[41:05] Yeah I mean since I started researching this topic years ago, I'm now very conscious when I'm in a room with lots of people, and not a lot of ventilation. I can feel myself getting tired and instead of being like “I'm cranky, I'm irritable” and I’m taking it out on someone around me, it’s easy and I realized “oh there's too much carbon dioxide in here I'm going to go outside for a second.”
And I go outside and I breathe and I feel better within a couple of minutes, and I go back in and I'm ready to hit it again. So being conscious of this, being conscious of how these can affect the people around us, is a personal step you can take in your day to day, and then beyond that, evangelizing to your friends and co-workers and letting them know the same thing is true and to take those brakes, to get out of the city every now and then and go breathe that fresh country air.
On that note I guess that wraps it up for this week. A lot of time and research does go into making these episodes possible; we will never use ads to support this podcast so if you enjoy it and would like us to keep going, you can support us by giving us a review or recommending us to a friend.
Again we did a lot of research for this episode and all these papers and more are available on our website at ashesashes.org
You can also find us on your favorite social network @ashesashescast where we post all sorts of news stories and things about the terrible things going on all around us all the time.
Until next week
Bye