CO2: Death by Asphyxiation

Is our destiny going to be the same as that of dinosaurs?

In Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ movie (1940), the last dinosaurs were shown dying in a hot and dry desert. They may have been wiped out by CO2-caused asphyxiation. Is this our destiny, too? This is a story about serendipity discoveries during a trip from Serbia to Italy.

I wake up at 3:00 am in my hotel room in Belgrade. My plane leaves at 6:30 am, and I have a taxi to the airport at 4:00. I stumble around, sleepy, packing my things. Two days before, at the meeting I was attending, I presented my results about carbon dioxide, CO2, as a metabolic poison. Vertebrate brains — including ours — are very sensitive to CO2 poisoning. It is what I have been working on for quite a while. It has to do with the “global dumbing” idea. Maybe it is not just CO2, other pollutants may play a role — maybe something else altogether. But it seems to be happening. People are really getting lower scores on IQ tests.

The ecosystem, whatever it is that makes people dumb, must affect the whole ecosystem. But how? When? In which terms? I finish packing. At nearly four am, I walk out of the door of my hotel toward the Vase Čarapića avenue. I think I look like a Dinosaur from Disney’s Fantasia movie, stumbling on toward extinction. The dinosaurs are supposed to have been dumb. Was that the cause of their extinction? The taxi arrives and we leave for the airport. I won’t go extinct tonight.

About poisoning the atmosphere, thoughts move free inside my mind. They say it was an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. But how exactly? Heat? Darkness? Freezing temperatures? But how come there were so many more extinctions on Earth, and the one of the dinosaurs was not the largest? There has to be some common element, a thread that links all of them. Could it have been CO2 poisoning?

Belgrade is not part of the Schengen area, so long lines for passport control. They want to control it twice, why? Maybe because they suffer from global dumbing, too? At the end of the second line, one guy sits at a table, stamping passports, one after the other. He must spend his life doing that. For an instant, we look into each other’s eyes. I wonder if he wonders if I wonder what he wonders. Maybe he is also thinking about the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs. Who was that philosopher who took up a menial job, polishing glass lenses, so that he could think about philosophy? Spinoza? I think so. But there is no philosophical treatise about dinosaurs.

I sit in the lounge area. No dinosaurs there, although there is an eerie feeling of an extinction in progress. But never mind that. I open up my PC. I ask Grok: Is there evidence that CO2 directly causes extinctions? Grok says no, no evidence for that. Politically correct as usual, ugly beast. Claude, instead, says yes, it is true. I ask, “Are you sure?” And it generates a graph that shows the exact opposite. Dumb thing. I try with Manus. The dingy thing spends a lot of time looking for data (bad connection), then it comes up with a graph so absurd that I can’t help but insult the poor thing all the way to its vacuum tube ancestors. It apologizes profusely, so sorry that he hallucinated so badly. Is global dumbing affecting AIs, too? Never mind that. Sycophants be gone!

I have to do better. I have to dig out Sepkoski’s data on extinctions — that guy spent his whole life digging out data from the library. His achievement: the record of extinctions for Earth’s ecosystem over the whole Phanerozoic. 540 million years, no kidding. Why so many extinctions? Is Gaia such a ruthless deity? The biosphere seems to be on the brink of extinction all the time, and yet it always survives. I have to compare Sepkoski’s results to those of Judd et al. on CO2 concentrations. Not the kind of thing you can do in an airport’s departure lounge, sleepy from having awakened at 3 am.

My flight is being called. Just as a last thing, I try the good old Google Scholar. And it comes up with this:

Eh…? It is exactly what I wanted to know, or so it seems. I download the paper on the fly (while we are not flying yet). Before I get on the plane, I manage to take a look at the introduction. Impressive. The author seems to have done exactly what I had in mind to do. We board, and I sit watching the clouds outside. Not enough space to open my laptop there. Dinosaurs? Extinctions? Global dumbing? Too sleepy to think about that. I watch the land from the plane window. What would I see, down there, if I were living in the Jurassic Period? Nothing. At that time, that land was under the Tethys Ocean. Maybe some marine dinosaurs would pop up there.

We land in Florence at 8:40 am. They want to check our passports again — another long line. They must be truly afraid of global dumbing if they want to check our passports so many times. As I walk toward the exit, two guys in uniform stare at me with menacing glances. I wonder whether they would stop me if I had a black band on one of my eyes. But they don’t seem to be interested in me.

In the hall of the Vespucci Airport, in Florence, I take another look at Davis’s paper. I can’t read a whole scientific paper in the airport’s lobby. But it looks so hugely interesting that I am tempted to do exactly that — no matter how sleepy I am. But I have had enough of airports. I board the train to downtown, surrounded by a group of old foreign ladies following their guide. They look a little like the dinosaurs in the movie. Are tourists going to go extinct? Could be.

Back home, I fall into bed, exhausted. But before closing my eyes, I open my PC and I scan Davis’ paper. And what a paper! Mr. Davis did exactly what I had in mind to do. He started with Sepkosky’s data on extinctions, then he compared the timeline of extinctions with the data on CO2 concentrations — he used Royer’s data instead of Judd’s data, but that can’t make a big difference.

It is a huge, detailed, and complete paper. A lot of work, and of high quality. And its conclusions are clear: CO2 concentrations and extinctions go hand-in-hand. CO2 is a major cause of mass extinctions — instead, there is no evidence that high temperatures have a role. Davis thinks it was an effect of oceanic acidification that kills marine life and hence causes atmospheric anoxia. In my paper, I argued for a direct metabolic effect of CO2 on aerobic life. Whatever the case, dinosaurs didn’t boil over; they were asphyxiated.

Suddenly, the abyss is opening in front of me. Everything clicks into the right places. The geosphere doesn’t care about the biosphere’s metabolism, but periodically, it spews out carbon in one of those vast, spectacular, and disastrous events called the “large igneous provinces” (LIPs). Davis reports references arguing that LIPs may be periodically triggered by the galactic trajectory of the Solar System that goes through a 26 My cycle. Is it possible? The references cited are by serious scientists. But it is not a critical point: whatever causes the LIPs, their effects are clear, One of those things that blow out your mind.

What a view of the past half-billion years! During that long time, the biosphere and the geosphere were engaged in a tug-of-war to control the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The geosphere tends to increase the CO2 concentration, and the biosphere tends to lower it. When the geosphere has the upper hand, high CO2 creates havoc with the aerobic metabolism of living beings: brains stop functioning; muscles can’t carry their bodies along, and genera go extinct. Dinosaurs, in particular, were so big that they needed huge amounts of oxygen just to stand up. And that’s why they died asphyxiated.

But when the biosphere has the upper hand, it takes the CO2 down to low levels, and vertebrates can oxygenate large brains. The dinosaurs were getting to that point: the Troodonts of the late Cretaceous were becoming more and more intelligent, and they might have become the “dinosauroids” that the palaeontologist Dale Russell had imagined. But something happened, and the great K-Pg catastrophe wiped them out and brought CO2 back to high levels. The biosphere had to wait for 60 million years to reduce the CO2 concentration to levels low enough to make possible the evolution of the most encephalized creatures in the history of Earth: us

And now? The creature that was made possible by low CO2 levels is making itself impossible by increasing the CO2 levels to values that would make dinosaurs happy. Davis estimates that the current trajectory of CO2 emissions could generate a 6%-8% loss of genera. Which genera? Well, highly encephalized creatures are probably the most vulnerable ones. You understand what I mean.

Sitting in bed in front of the screen, I am staring into the abyss. For a moment, I feel like falling into it. But does human extinction really matter? The biosphere will eventually bring CO2 levels back to those before the extinction of the last hominins (us). Gaia may be ruthless, but she is not in a hurry. She is more than four billion years old, and she still has at least one more billion years to live. Sixty million years to return to low CO2 concentrations is nothing. There will be new intelligent species on Earth. Smarter than us. It is just a question of time.

Sleepy, I close my eyes. Sixty million years? Tomorrow is another day.

Note added after publication: I discovered that by mistake I hadn’t checked the box that allows readers to comment. Now it is OK and you can comment in the comment page. Sorry about that. Evidently, global dumbing is affecting me, too!

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Notes:

1. The meeting I attended in Belgrade was the “World Conference on Science and Art for Sustainability,” masterfully organized by Prof. Nebojsa Neskovich

2. The author of the paper I am citing in this post, William Jackson Davis, seems to be a mystery himself. His CV is impressive, but he doesn’t seem to have published a lot of papers. He is the director and the founder of the “Environmental Studies Institute” in California. Apparently, the only member of it. He doesn’t have a social profile, no Wikipedia entry; no birthdate mentioned, although, from his CV, it seems clear that he has been around for quite a while. Good scientists age gracefully, like wine. And, nowadays, innovative science can only be done by white haired scientists.

3. There is another paper supporting the idea of a direct role of CO2 in mass extinction. Correctly titled “The Lungs of the Earth” (2018) by Andrew Yoram Glikson, who also published an interesting book titled “The Plutocene.” (I would love to read it, but at 96 dollars for a copy, it is outside anyone’s budget). Anyway, another white-haired scientist.

4. Maybe our silicon children will replace us. They don’t need oxygen to power the complicated reactions of the Krebs cycle. They can get electrons from sunlight and use them to do whatever they want.

5. My trip to Belgrade was marked by strange coincidences. As I was getting ready to go to the evening session, I noted that Simon Sheridan, who lives in Australia, had published a post in which he noted that someone created a “Liquid Tree” using algae. Simon didn’t like the idea, but I found it interesting. And I discovered that the liquid tree in question was at some 100 meters from my hotel in Belgrade!! That very evening, I went to see it, and I also wrote to the developer and I met him in person the day after.