Perhaps it was caused by breathlessness, but last week's column contained an unfortunate typo which suggested the world might be short of oxygen.
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The good news is that is not yet another environment problem we need to solve.
Oxygen is a highly reactive substance, which makes it both essential and hazardous. The Apollo 13 crew witnessed this when their oxygen tanks exploded.
The irony is that, while we feel well disposed to oxygen, it is also toxic and breathing the pure form can be lethal.
If the concentration is too high it damages lung tissues, causing alveoli (tiny air sacs) to fill with fluid. It can even result in a collapsed lung.
Oxygen stresses the body's chemical machinery. So-called "free radicals" are a byproduct of metabolism and, like bored thugs, they wander around causing damage. Your body then needs to maintain a set of mechanisms to control their behaviour.
Then there's the growing market for antioxidants which raises another irony - that high-dose supplements can be harmful.
Excess beta-carotene may increase the risk of lung cancer in smokers and high doses of vitamin E may increase the risk of prostate cancer.
The better way to get antioxidants is through a diet of vegetables and fruits, which has the benefit of being cheaper and more enjoyable.
Surprisingly, oxygen was responsible for the Earth's first mass extinction event, which occurred about 2.4 billion years ago.
Prior to that time there was very little pure oxygen, but the increasing concentration effectively poisoned the anaerobic species that were the dominant life.
In yet another irony, that oxygen was generated by the ancestors of cyanobacteria, a distant relative of the "blue green algae" that can poison rivers and lakes.
A side effect was that oxygen in the oceans caused dissolved iron to rust, dumping vast deposits of ore - which we now mine.
By changing the balance of the atmosphere it weakened the greenhouse effect, causing planetary cooling and probably triggered a series of ice ages known as the Huronian glaciation.
All this serves to demonstrate that the Earth is a deeply interconnected system.
We now know that the planet's geology (the "geosphere") is fundamentally linked to the biosphere.
Changes to one can have a profound influence on the other and the Great Oxidation Event shows how biology can change the geology of the planet.
Now we're seeing this again on a vast scale as human burning of fossil fuels is changing the composition of the atmosphere and disrupting what was a stable climate.
This is triggering the Anthropocene geological epoch in which humans and the planet are deeply entwined. Our influence will continue for thousands of years.
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