It won't cause lunar warming. But it will still be a problem and require significant energy and other resources.
It's likely that it will either be impossible or prohibitively expensive to keep CO2 levels at normal Earth standards.
See also: the ISS which operates with much higher atmospheric CO2 levels (up to 5000ppm) than would be considered healthy on earth (up to 1000ppm).
I think we shouldn't use orbital space station where space and energy is very constrained as model for lunar base (where space and energy will be quite easy to get by comparatively).
Average person breaths out ~1kg of CO2 per day or ~400 per year [1]. Corn field absorbs ~4000 kg of CO2 yearly per 1000 m2 [2]. The same 1000 m2 field will produce ~4000 ears or 320 000 kcal yearly [3][4]
Assuming 2000 kcal for average person (so 730 000 kcal yearly) - we need 2000 m2 of corn fields to produce food for that person and just 100m2 to absorb CO2 from that person. Food will be a more important constraint in a self-sustaining base.
That means if we build lunar base in the lava tubes (that are often over 300 meters wide and go on for kilometers), we can keep them self-sustainable at density of 1 person per less than 10 meters of the lava tube.
[1] https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/waiting-exhale#:~:text=So%20bre....)
[2] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/corn_fields_help_clean_up_and_...
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-many-ears-of-sweet-corn-are-in-an-...
[4] https://www.nutritionix.com/i/usda/corn-1-ear-medium-6-0.75-...
There is a lot of very dubious math in everything from ‘amount of water consumed’ and ‘amount of carbon absorbed’, etc. which if you dig into it really doesn’t add up. This feels like one of them?
To solve this you need initial biomass (or CO2) and then after the harvest you burn or otherwise decompose everything you didn't eat to close the cycle and get your CO2 (and some of the energy) back.
The easiest way to achieve that initial CO2 concentration would probably be to bring about ~3.5 tonnes of coal per person, burn it with oxygen mined from lunar soil generating energy for your initial base-building (24 MWh of heat about 40% of which you can convert to electric energy) and capturing the resulting 8 tonnes of CO2 for agriculture.
Of course you'd bring reasonably pure carbon, not the cheap dirty stuff we dig from the ground with heavy metals and sulphur in it. Also catalyst would be needed to avoid producing carbon monoxide.
Another concern is how much volume of air we need in these tubes to keep the atmosphere breathable and suitable for enough CO2 to supply plants.
Assume the tube is a cylinder 150m in radius and 10 meter in height (height is horizontal here ;) ). That's 700 000 m3 of air which should weight about 857 500 kg. At 410.28 ppmv CO2 in air we can calculate that 0.0623240117 % of the air mass should be CO2, which is ~535 kg in that 10-meter section of the tube. This is a long way off the 8 tonnes of CO2 needed to grow the plants, but they don't want all of that CO2 at once anyway - so we store the waste plant matter from harvest and burn it slowly over the year to keep CO2 concentration in air breathable.
We could also separate the atmospheres for plants and for people to optimize CO2 ppm for each, but that makes math more complicated :)
I work in a very small office shed, and if I leave the door and window closed tight it will quickly get over 2000 ppm (45-60 min). At that point I'm typically feeling more tired, and a bit foggy.
By keeping the window cracked I can keep the readings down in the 800-1100 range, and I feel much better.
In particular I find I am much less groggy in the mornings, and stepping outside doesn't feel like a breath of fresh air.
The changes I made are not options for most. I have an industrial rooftop HVAC unit for a space about 5x larger than my home. The fans run continually and there is no fresh air exchange per se but part of the return duct runs through the attic which is not air-tight, more of an open cavity. I change the air filter every 3 months and keep the returns clean by vacuuming regularly. I try not to close doors to encourage circulation, and my bedroom door had an vent to the hall above it -- not sound or light proof, but doesn't restrict airflow.
The key that I've found is airflow. A closed room and a bunch of fans won't help you, but circulating the air of your entire home will make a big difference. It's important that your home breathes. An airtight home is actually very unhealthy, though heating/cooling is more efficient.
Lastly, cooking is the worst offender for poor air quality. Having a stove-top exhaust hood that actually filters and vents outside is so important. Cooking without exhaust or fresh air can easily bring the kitchen and surrounding areas near 1000ppm in under an hour. I keep my exhaust vent on more often than not and it makes a big difference. Negative air pressure is good: air is pulled in from outside.
So just curious for my own designs, how certain are you about those ppm numbers you listed?
I'm thinking that the specific CO2 concentrations matter if one wants to relate the readings to various research on human mental performance.
Also, I am finding products that seem to require an Android or iOS device to work: no. They must be independent. If they had a webserver, nice idea, but all connections should be unrequired and switchable to off.
I would have assumed CO2 from the context, but since you mentioned cars I'm wondering if you mean CO, VOCs, and/or PM32.
Unless your car has the fans off and the windows rolled up for a really long time, I'd be surprised if CO2 was something you need to worry about. Maybe if you're sleeping in it with the windows rolled up?
CO in the house is definitely a concern. If you have a fireplace, woodstove, or furnace with a properly functioning chimney, you're unlikely to run into problems AFAIK. But people die every winter because they used a propane grill, or kerosene heater, or gas stove/oven in their house without proper ventilation. Or used a wood stove with ineffective / blocked chimney. So in colder climates having a functioning CO meter seems like a no-brainer.
In the house, similar awareness could be beneficial.
But I have not yet found a decent product. It is unacceptable that one is supposed to have a Google account or similar in order to read a ruler or configure a blender.
Sometimes I've had similar lines of questioning. Where it occurs to me that something might be a risk worth addressing, and so I'd better gather data until I'm confident everything is okay or that I'll have a way to notice when the risk becomes real.
Every(?) time I've gone down that route, I later concluded that the concern really wasn't that big a deal, and that I'd just be hyper-focused on it because of anxiety or A.D.D. I.e., in the overall scheme of things, the true risks that deserve priority are pretty evident: good sleep and body weight, exercise, not smoking, keeping my finances in order, etc. I have a tendency to forget those primary issues when I start focusing on something that could, potentially, under some circumstances become a problem.
When I go down those rabbit trails, I end up reading a lot of articles, buying some unnecessary stuff from Amazon, planning for a project that realistically I'd never complete, and just worrying a lot.
If there's any takeaway from all this (for me, at least), it's "don't sweat the (probably) small stuff".
You need about 2000 m2 of corn to feed one person over 1 year and just 100 m2 of corn will capture the CO2 exhaled by that 1 person in 1 year. Assume we live in horizontal lava tubes 300m wide, let's say 10 meters of that tube per person to have some margin of error. That's <535 kg of CO2 in air in that section of the tube and ~8000 kg of CO2 captured in corn planted there the moment before harvest.
It's doable IMHO. At least napkin math checks out.
Get plants with a more favorable Edible Carbon::Total Carbon ratio.
A plant that can be harvested continuously would also be beneficial.
The ideal plant may be something simple like grass. We can't eat it, so would need another intermediate step. Possibly Cows or Sheep. These would be grown for milk and not meat.