Indoor CO2 could cut our capacity for complex, strategic thinking: study
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
> They created a model of a classroom full of elementary school children, with the appropriate breathing rates and room ventilation. (Karnauskas said the results would be similar for any group of people.) Then they looked at what would happen in two potential emissions scenarios projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
> The results showed that in a business-as-usual scenario, in which carbon emissions continue to rise, humans would score 50% lower on measures of complex cognitive ability by 2100. For more basic cognitive measures, performance would drop about 25%.
Not exactly a rigorous model.
Edit: Which doesn't mean there isn't a problem, but this sort of article doesn't seem helpful to me.
So I do agree with the critical comments, to the extent that this isn’t enough proof and we need better studies, but the theory seems credible and worth further study. But the dismissive attitude makes no sense to me, and if increased CO2 levels do have a proven effect on cognition, and CO2 levels are actually on track to rise to levels with a significant effect, that’s a really big deal.
If you ever take a Co2 sensor into a standard office environment or even your home, you're in for a bit of a shock.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/08/indoor-c...
I guess the point of the article is to say “here’s an implication of climate change that you possibly hadn’t thought/heard about.”
I know I’m inclined to think this is a serious issue and the effect of present indoor/city/outdoor CO2 levels on cognition is something I was concerned about anyway. CO2 levels outdoors are already 1/3 higher than 100 years ago and something like double the level of 10,000 years ago. And people spend more times indoors in better-sealed houses and denser offices.
In other words, this article only holds under the assumption that ventilation stays as bad as it is. If we improve ventilation, we can get an improvement much bigger than the increase in background CO2.
The article even says so:
"In a 2002 study, researchers tested the air in 120 Texas classrooms, and found CO2 levels above 1,000 ppm in 88% of them. In 21% of the classrooms, the concentration exceeded 3,000 ppm." -- current background is ~410 ppm (possibly higher in cities) so even a doubling + better ventilation would improve the situation in most classrooms.
"As carbon dioxide levels rise, better ventilation won't be enough to protect us from its effects.
"There's no way to solve this except for keep the CO2 low," Karnauskas said. "You can try to increase ventilation, but you're only going to be ventilating higher-CO2 air, because it's going up outside.""
If CO2 concentrations outdoors double, you're already looking at a minimum of 1000ppm indoors.
That's why they put me in an open plan office. Where -- as if by design -- the oxygen, lighting and noise levels already preclude those fancy kinds of thinking.
I’d imagine it wouldn’t do much, but perhaps large amounts of other biomass might help.
I've grown some hydroponic basil that makes almost 50g of material per day, so maybe it's possible to have 60 indoor basil plants to offset your carbon production. When I chopped the basil plant, it was as tall as I was.
In other words, a 100ppm lower CO2 level might make you grasp concepts 3-5% quicker, but it most certainly won't make you pick up that book in the first place if you didn't want to.
I guess the main heat retention is in the objects and not so much the hot air, so the strategy would be to vent through and replace the air in as short as possible a time every few hours?
There is also one result for 50 euros (1.7/5 star average) but alongside the 250-500 euro results that doesn't seem like it'll be the same thing.
Edit: Looking it up, the Wikipedia article on CO2 has the following to say on the topic:
> A study of humans exposed in 2.5 hour sessions demonstrated significant negative effects on cognitive abilities at concentrations as low as 0.1% (1000ppm) CO2
> Another study observed a decline in basic activity level and information usage at 1000 ppm, when compared to 500 ppm.
So 1ppk is definitely bad. Another datapoint is from 5ppk:
> At [5000 ppm for an 8h period, the] International Space Station crew experienced headaches, lethargy, mental slowness, emotional irritation, and sleep disruption.
When the meter hits ~1000ppm, I open all windows until the level is below 500ppm again. Otherwise they stay closed to keep humidity in.
My office has forced ventilation, the level there is usually around 700ppm all day.
I'd be interested in measuring NOx levels, sadly I don't have a sensor for that. A few people in the office like to open windows for comfort, our air tends to feel a bit stale, even though it's continuously exchanged. My theory is that by opening the windows we let NOx in, which causes the staleness and in high enough levels irritates eyes and throats.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D9SH4M5/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Unfortunately, it's showing out of stock. :-(
You can also run Tasmota firmware on ESP8266 which means you can easily monitor CO2 value from your browser.
For real CO2 sensors, not yet. The smallest accurate sensor I've worked with is the SCD30 and it's much too large to fit into a watch body as-is.
Sensirion has come up with the SCD40 though, which is 12x12x7mm and should make a wearable CO2 sensor feasible.
CO2 is not the only factor you should look at, PM are also dangerous when you cook, or when there is outside pollution. NO2/O3 is an outdoor air pollution that we watch. Because the only way to get out the CO2 is ventilation / open your windows for a few minutes. But it can bring another kind of pollution depending your area.
> Last month I moved into a small cottage behind a big group house. The cottage is lovely. The big group house is also lovely, but the people in it started suffering mysterious minor ailments. Headaches, fatigue, poor sleep – all the things that will make your local family doctor say “Take two placebo and call me in the morning”. Using my years of medical training and expertise, I was able to…remain completely unaware of the problem while my housemates solved it themselves.
> Aware of this research, my housemates tested their air quality and got levels between 1000 and 3000 ppm, around the level of the worst high-CO2 conditions in the studies. They started leaving their windows open and buying industrial quantities of succulent plants, and the problems mostly disappeared. Since then they’ve spread the word to other people we know afflicted with mysterious fatigue, some of whom have also noticed positive results.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/23/carbon-dioxide-an-open...
It's hard to believe the Navy didn't study this topic as far back as the 1950s and conclude that there was no scientific meat on its bones. If they didn't, they certainly should have.
(Please consider reading the article, then moderating the comment. It's an interesting subject, one that I have basically no knowledge or opinions on myself. Reflexive downvoting makes it hard to pretend that you're not bringing your own preconceptions to the table.)
If you don't want a knee-jerk reaction, don't share articles from a site that's widely known to be rather one-sided and biased, and with a super divisive tone to it. Your wording also makes has a rather biased tone to it "It's hard to believe Navy didn't study ..."
Here's a very recent study with some interesting comments: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-019-0071-6.pdf?proof=...
"It may be that astronaut-like operations personnel and submariners, who are high-level performers, are more likely to have heightened situational awareness because of their stringent training. Therefore, these groups may develop faster adaptive patterns of responses and be more perceptive of their cognitive decline, and therefore may compensate more efficiently for self-perceived drops in performance than subjects drawn from the general population. Such distinctions could explain the differences in outcomes between college students and submariners to elevated CO"
Seems reasonable that CO2 might have a different effect when motivation is also a huge factor. If you're in a submarine, feeling a bit tired is not an excuse. But in an office setting, it could be what pushes you over the edge to drift away mentally and maybe start procrastinating. In a school setting, motivating students is already a huge uphill battle.
But sure, only the studies the navy did matter, and we should not discuss science in nuanced terms. It's all just the scary researches trying to make CO2 look like a boogey-man!
That said, I think the headline in this post is a bit sensationalist. Seems doubtful that the effects will be that high. But there it is plausible that global CO2 rise could lead to some cognitive decline. Especially if you combine with the trend of packing more people into the same office space.