A scientific study in Nature claims that the Earth will run out of breathable oxygen!

Nature is the most respected, highest impact scientific journal in natural sciences...

Sure. But its probably on a 10 million year cycle.

LOL, yeah, sure.

LOL, yeah, sure.

Nature is the most respected, highest impact scientific journal in natural sciences...

Indeed it is.

Quite frankly, I don't know why this is in nature.

I am a physics major and in the statistical mechanics class, we calculated the rate at which atmospheric molecules escape the Earth's gravity well.

Their speed obeys the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. There's always a small fraction of molecules with a speed equivalent or higher to the escape velocity. That is, they escape to space and never return.

Nature is the most respected, highest impact scientific journal in natural sciences...

And the Lancet and the NEJM are two of the most respected medical journals out there.
QUOTE
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine” (1).

More recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote that “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness” (2).
END QUOTE
[link to www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (secure)]

The problem with this research is that like most modern research, it makes a lot of assumptions. We don't know for certain what the planet's condition in the past was, we think we know but it's really just guesswork and that's especially true of the planet's atmosphere in the past. That said, we certainly don't know why other planet's have the atmosphere they have or what changes have occurred on those planets over time. In other words, were they always in the state they're in now or did they once have an earth like atmosphere? What all this means is that this research is guesswork aided by a computer model, something modern science relies on far to often these days but something that will inevitably be relied on even more in the future. Assuming the reasearch is accurate, it's highly unlikely that human beings will be around to see it because assuming evoltuion is accurate we will have evolved into something vastly different in a billion years than what we are now. Even if evoltuion is wrong or we really are the top of the evolutionary chain...god help us all...then we'll likely be extinct by that time or if we're really lucky, we'll have left the planet assuming we can find a way to overcome the radiation outside our geocorona. The most likely scenario is we'll have killed ourselves off in a nuclear war or we'll have invented an even better way to do it. The one thing this study does make me wonder is, if model is accurate, should we really be reducing the CO2 output from humans on this planet in anyway? Probably not. In fact, we should be generating more and we should certainly be planting more trees...a lot more trees.

Natural sciences are a different thing.