Killing People by Lies: The "CO2 is Good for you" Campaign Continues

Are we happily walking into a gas chamber thinking it is a shower?

Not so long ago, in Germany, people were led to gas chambers while being told that they would be given a shower. Some people claim that it is not true, or at least it is exaggerated, but the story makes sense and, surely, is not beyond the evil level seen in many other cases in history (see my book “Exterminations”). The easiest way to have people do something harmful to themselves is to convince them that they will benefit from it. We see this method applied every day in politics.

An especially cruel example of this strategy is the current campaign to define CO2, carbon dioxide, as a good thing. It is said to be “food for plants,” it makes Earth greener, it makes fields produce more food. The more we emit of it into the atmosphere, the better. The campaign has been ongoing for a few months, and it seems to have been successful. It attacks climate science from an unexpected angle, and the counter-reaction was weak and ineffective. Most climate scientists are specialists in atmospheric physics whose job is to publish academic papers that nobody will read except other specialists. They know nearly nothing about CO2 chemistry, and they are not trained to handle a debate that looks scientific, but is political. Imagine Stephen Hawking engaged in a tavern brawl. Something like that.

These campaigns have a logical progression: you see in the picture how, after having promoted CO2 as a good thing, now the campaign is moving one step forward, demonizing those who claimed it is a “deadly poison.” Demonization is one of the most effective weapons in the propaganda toolbox: identify the enemy, and put them on a defensive stance. In the discussion on the image above on social media, you can see good-willed people desperately countering the claim by saying, “We never said that CO2 is a deadly poison.” It is more evidence that the campaign is working. In politics, once you are forced to defend yourself, you have already lost.

Except that CO2 IS a deadly poison.

It is the dose that makes the poison, and we know perfectly well that a sufficiently high dose of CO2 can kill people. Obviously, the current atmospheric concentrations are far lower than the deadly dose, but the mechanisms at play are the same. CO2 is an active molecule that has multiple effects on the metabolism of living beings. It is necessary for plants, and more of it may make plants grow faster. But we are not plants. For animals, as we are, CO2 is not food: it is waste.

We have sophisticated and complex mechanisms at play in our bodies designed to remove the CO2 that our metabolism produces, optimized by millions of years of evolution for concentrations of CO2 much lower than the current ones. None of our ancestors ever lived at the CO2 concentrations we are experiencing nowadays, and we are tampering with the mechanisms that keep us alive. We have no idea of what the long-term effects will be.

What are we doing to ourselves? Are we happily walking into a gas chamber, thinking it is a shower?

If you want to know the details of this story, take a look at my paper on Arxiv. With some colleagues, we are trying to publish an extended version that summarizes the results of several studies examining the harmful effects of low concentrations of CO2. If you would like to have a preprint, ask me in the comments.