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Study: ‘Global warming ‘could rob our planet of oxygen’ – ‘Would obviously kill most of life on Earth’

Global warming has triggered an array of apocalyptic scenarios for future generations, from worsening drought, storms and floods to melted icesheets and rising seas.

Now a new study, published on Tuesday and coinciding with the UN climate talks in Paris, adds to the grim tableau: the risk that warming at the far end of the scale could rob our planet of oxygen.

“We have identified another possible consequence of … global warming that can potentially be more dangerous than all others,” say a pair of scientists from Britain’s University of Leicester.

Their study, based in the peer-reviewed journal the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, is based on a computer model of phytoplankton, the microscopic sea plants which produce about two-thirds of the oxygen in the atmosphere.

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