A blood test number drifted slightly over twenty years, and nobody adjusted for the fact that the labs kept swapping out the machines used to measure it. The number went up, a scary headline was spread around, but why?

The body keeps blood acidity within a very strict band, and bicarbonate is part of the system that balances it. The researchers noticed the average bicarbonate reading in a big US health survey crept up about 7% since 1999, and atmospheric CO2 also went up over the same period, so they drew a line between the two and extended it fifty years into the future, which became a headline story. I think I’ve seen this before somewhere…

Scale seems to be the source of confusion. The extra CO2 you inhale from the atmosphere rising 369 to 420 ppm is a rounding error compared to the CO2 your own body produces every second. Your lungs clear it effortlessly. To move blood chemistry the amount they measured, you would need to breathe air with fifty to a hundred times more added CO2 than the atmosphere actually gained. So the atmosphere physically cannot be the cause.

Having once upon a time personally traced an astrophysics/space critical data anomaly to a UART9960 serial port, I asked myself what could cause this instead?

Different lab machines (the survey used at least four different analyzers over the period, and they disagree by roughly the size of the whole effect) are one factor, before we get to an aging and heavier population, and more people on blood pressure pills that raise the reading, on top of changes in how samples were handled.

I read the paper several times and am certain the authors adjusted for none of it, before I found that they conceded the point themselves in a follow-up article they wrote for The Conversation: correlation is not causation, and they skipped diet, kidney function, medications, and obesity.

Ok, then. We have two lines that both slope upward, a “science” mechanism that fails at basic math, and a press office spreading FUD. What’s the most damning part of this? The paper ran in February and got a full press cycle in March, complete with headlines about CO2 weakening human skeletons. I mean, it even looks like the physiology contradiction of the paper already exists in the literature the paper itself cites. Six months later, with nothing corrected and nothing added, the lead author’s own institute pushed the same release out again in August and so here we are.

Integrity breach.