The Next Liberal Crisis: Oxygen (Lack thereof)

At 7% oxygen we all die!

I was doing some reading on “global warming” which is always good for a laugh when I came upon what appears to be the next big thing… the Oxygen Crisis!  Yup, you guessed it… the world is running out of the stuff because of man made pollution.  Sounds crazy but here are some points:

The rise in carbon dioxide emissions is big news. It is prompting action to reverse global warming. But little or no attention is being paid to the long-term fall in oxygen concentrations and its knock-on effects.

Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth, according to Roddy Newman, who is drafting a new book, The Oxygen Crisis.

The points seem to be the increasing amounts of so called “dead zones” in the world’s oceans where there is no plant life which produces O2 (and CO2!).  These people also say that by burning fossil fuels we are using up tons of oxygen doing so and this is causing there to be less and less of the stuff in the air:

In the 20th century, humanity has pumped increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning the carbon stored in coal, petroleum and natural gas. In the process, we’ve also been consuming oxygen and destroying plant life – cutting down forests at an alarming rate and thereby short-circuiting the cycle’s natural rebound. We’re artificially slowing down one process and speeding up another, forcing a change in the atmosphere.

And you thought you were just cooking marshmellows.

Advocates of this theory then say that, although no research has been done on the subject, if humans have less oxygen in every breath than they should (what this “should” is nobody knows) then we might all get sick or not live as long:

At these levels it is difficult for people to get sufficient oxygen to maintain bodily health: it takes a proper intake of oxygen to keep body cells and organs, and the entire immune system, functioning at full efficiency. At the levels we have reached today cancers and other degenerative diseases are likely to develop. And at 6 to 7% life can no longer be sustained.

There is even an organization for this crisis called the Global Oxygen Crisis.  On their website they say:

The existing levels of OXYGEN are now less than 19% down from an originally estimated 38%. When we reach 7% human life will CEASE to exist.

To put this into context the human contribution towards CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is a whopping 0.117%

Just when you thought there wasn’t some other un-scientifically provable problem to worry about!

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