I am so sorry to bring you this news, especially if you haven’t yet heard, but it is so dire I feel I have to.

 I’ll let the headline tell the story:

NASA Warns Earth Is Running Out of Oxygen, Study Predicts End Date

Earth is running out of oxygen?! Bummer. I guess we should just get our affairs in order and man-up for the end. Tell your spouse you love them and call your mother if you can.

How bad is it? How little time do we have left? Well, researchers used climate and bio geochemical models to simulate the Earth’s future atmospheric changes … and determined that oxygen levels will plummet to deadly levels in about one billion years.

One billion years?! At the rate humans are going and with the rapid onset of artificial intelligence and ever-more deadly and easily dispersible weapons, we’ll be lucky if we make it another one hundred years! Maybe that headline (MSN/The Hearty Soul) was nothing more than clickbait. (Which, unfortunately, would make it like nearly every other headline on nearly ever mainstream “news” platform.)

The “expert” study revealed that oxygen levels will eventually collapse as the sun brightens.

Because, according to these scientists, as the sun brightens, carbon dioxide will rapidly diminish, halting photosynthesis and thereby causing oxygen levels to plummet. This seems ironic to me, as I’ve been taught to believe that carbon dioxide is a dangerous “greenhouse gas” that is proliferating and leading to the global warming that will soon cause Earth to burst into flames and the ocean to boil. And now we’re being told that carbon dioxide is necessary for a robust and stable supply of life-giving oxygen?

I’m confused. I can’t breathe. I don’t know what to think.

Just kidding! Carbon dioxide and oxygen levels are fine.

Ignore the clickbait and breathe easy, everyone.

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License