From Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, something that might finally explain Al Gore’s behavior – too much time spent indoors and in auditoriums giving pitches about the dangers of CO2. One wonders though what the Navy submarine service has to say about this new research:
We try to keep CO2 levels in our U.S. Navy submarines no higher than 8,000 parts per million, about 20 time current atmospheric levels. Few adverse effects are observed at even higher levels. – Senate testimony of Dr. William Happer, here
This is backed up by the publication from the National Academies of Science Emergency and Continuous Exposure Guidance Levels for Selected Submarine Contaminants
which documents effects of CO2 at much much higher levels than the medical study, and shows regular safe exposure at these levels…
Data collected on nine nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines indicate an average CO2 concentration of 3,500 ppm with a range of 0-10,600 ppm, and data collected on 10 nuclear-powered attack submarines indicate an average CO2 concentration of 4,100 ppm with a range of 300-11,300 ppm (Hagar 2003). – page 46
…but shows no concern at the values of 600-2500 ppm of this medical study from LBNL. I figure if the Navy thinks it is safe for men who have their finger on the nuclear weapons keys, then that is good enough for me.
Elevated Indoor Carbon Dioxide Impairs Decision-Making Performance
Berkeley Lab scientists surprised to find significant adverse effects of CO2 on human decision-making performance.
Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have found that moderately high indoor concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) can significantly impair people’s decision-making performance. The results were unexpected and may have particular implications for schools and other spaces with high occupant density.
“In our field we have always had a dogma that CO2 itself, at the levels we find in buildings, is just not important and doesn’t have any direct impacts on people,” said Berkeley Lab scientist William Fisk, a co-author of the study, which was published in Environmental Health Perspectives online last month. “So these results, which were quite unambiguous, were surprising.” The study was conducted with researchers from State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University.
On nine scales of decision-making performance, test subjects showed significant reductions on six of the scales at CO2 levels of 1,000 parts per million (ppm) and large reductions on seven of the scales at 2,500 ppm. The most dramatic declines in performance, in which subjects were rated as “dysfunctional,” were for taking initiative and thinking strategically. “Previous studies have looked at 10,000 ppm, 20,000 ppm; that’s the level at which scientists thought effects started,” said Berkeley Lab scientist Mark Mendell, also a co-author of the study. “That’s why these findings are so startling.”
Berkeley Lab researchers found that even moderately elevated levels of indoor carbon dioxide resulted in lower scores on six of nine scales of human decision-making performance.
While the results need to be replicated in a larger study, they point to possible economic consequences of pursuing energy efficient buildings without regard to occupants. “As there’s a drive for increasing energy efficiency, there’s a push for making buildings tighter and less expensive to run,” said Mendell. “There’s some risk that, in that process, adverse effects on occupants will be ignored. One way to make sure occupants get the attention they deserve is to point out adverse economic impacts of poor indoor air quality. If people can’t think or perform as well, that could obviously have adverse economic impacts.”
The primary source of indoor CO2 is humans. While typical outdoor concentrations are around 380 ppm, indoor concentrations can go up to several thousand ppm. Higher indoor CO2 concentrations relative to outdoors are due to low rates of ventilation, which are often driven by the need to reduce energy consumption. In the real world, CO2 concentrations in office buildings normally don’t exceed 1,000 ppm, except in meeting rooms, when groups of people gather for extended periods of time.
In classrooms, concentrations frequently exceed 1,000 ppm and occasionally exceed 3,000 ppm. CO2 at these levels has been assumed to indicate poor ventilation, with increased exposure to other indoor pollutants of potential concern, but the CO2 itself at these levels has not been a source of concern. Federal guidelines set a maximum occupational exposure limit at 5,000 ppm as a time-weighted average for an eight-hour workday.
Fisk decided to test the conventional wisdom on indoor CO2 after coming across two small Hungarian studies reporting that exposures between 2,000 and 5,000 ppm may have adverse impacts on some human activities.
Berkeley Lab scientists Mark Mendell (left) and William Fisk
Fisk, Mendell, and their colleagues, including Usha Satish at SUNY Upstate Medical University, assessed CO2 exposure at three concentrations: 600, 1,000 and 2,500 ppm. They recruited 24 participants, mostly college students, who were studied in groups of four in a small office-like chamber for 2.5 hours for each of the three conditions. Ultrapure CO2 was injected into the air supply and mixing was ensured, while all other factors, such as temperature, humidity, and ventilation rate, were kept constant. The sessions for each person took place on a single day, with one-hour breaks between sessions.
Although the sample size was small, the results were unmistakable. “The stronger the effect you have, the fewer subjects you need to see it,” Fisk said. “Our effect was so big, even with a small number of people, it was a very clear effect.”
Another novel aspect of this study was the test used to assess decision-making performance, the Strategic Management Simulation (SMS) test, developed by SUNY. In most studies of how indoor air quality affects people, test subjects are given simple tasks to perform, such as adding a column of numbers or proofreading text. “It’s hard to know how those indicators translate in the real world,” said Fisk. “The SMS measures a higher level of cognitive performance, so I wanted to get that into our field of research.”
Strategic thinking and taking initiative showed the most dramatic declines in performance at 2,500 ppm carbon dioxide concentrations.
The SMS has been used most commonly to assess effects on cognitive function, such as by drugs, pharmaceuticals or brain injury, and as a training tool for executives. The test gives scenarios—for example, you’re the manager of an organization when a crisis hits, what do you do?—and scores participants in nine areas. “It looks at a number of dimensions, such as how proactive you are, how focused you are, or how you search for and use information,” said Fisk. “The test has been validated through other means, and they’ve shown that for executives it is predictive of future income and job level.”
Data from elementary school classrooms has found CO2 concentrations frequently near or above the levels in the Berkeley Lab study. Although their study tested only decision making and not learning, Fisk and Mendell say it is possible that students could be disadvantaged in poorly ventilated classrooms, or in rooms in which a large number of people are gathered to take a test. “We cannot rule out impacts on learning,” their report says.
The next step for the Berkeley Lab researchers is to reproduce and expand upon their findings. “Our first goal is to replicate this study because it’s so important and would have such large implications,” said Fisk. “We need a larger sample and additional tests of human work performance. We also want to include an expert who can assess what’s going on physiologically.”
Until then, they say it’s too early to make any recommendations for office workers or building managers. “Assuming it’s replicated, it has implications for the standards we set for minimum ventilation rates for buildings,” Fisk said. “People who are employers who want to get the most of their workforce would want to pay attention to this.”
Funding for this study was provided by SUNY and the state of New York.
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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov.
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Given what I’ve learned about the Navy exposure, I think this is just another scare tactic to make CO2 look like an invisible boogeyman.
I have always found in stuffy rooms that it is the reduction in oxygen levels and increased heat more than increased carbon dioxide that causes poor attention levels. At school in winter all windows shut and the heating on a class of 30 or so could get very stuffy very quickly especially in smaller classrooms, no forced air ventilation in my school.
James Bull
In poorly ventilated meeting rooms CO2 levels can rise into the thousands. And I’ve been in such rooms. It’s difficult to tell, as a participant, whether you’re feeling sleepy because of the speaker’s boring your arse off, or it’s the raised CO2, or both. Probably both. It’s possible to use the rise in CO2 in a meeting room to calculate the room air change rate. I’ve done this, as part of a ventilation investigation, using chemical indicator tubes to measure the CO2 (Drager tubes).
I agree that the study design is poor. No placebo, unclear selection criteria, small number of people, no allowance for accommodation or inurement, but I don’t think it was designed as yet more evidence of the danger of the terrible CO2 pollutant. Us sceptics are too sensitised to mickey-mouse, joke studies, there are so many that we see them everywhere. Our BS antennae are too highly tuned! In this case, although it was, and I’ll use a technical term here, a crap study, it wasn’t a joke study!
There are long-term implications for global population growth in this work. Place yourself with a fecund person of the opposite gender in a small room for a night of sleep, knowing that each will be exhaling the above-mentioned 0.4% CO2 with each breath. Males know the implications for future progeny of the well-known phrase “Not tonight, I have a headache”.
Add it to the already large list of disasters caused by an excess of CO2.
“…I and my wife sleep in a room which is around 12ft x 12ft x 8ft. We had new double-glazing fitted, which is pretty airtight….”
Thanks to all the responders, and particularly Lance Wallace who gave a very useful estimation of the whole situation. I suspect from his figures that many modern city dwellings subject occupants to CO2 levels in excess of 10,000 ppm after a nights sleep, and wonder if building codes take this into consideration…
The most interesting thing to come out of the comments for me is that realisation that it’s not only CO2 build up that happens in a closed room, but oxygen depletion, humidity increase, and no doubt a host of other issues. There is a move towards cutting energy use in the UK (whose politicians have signed themselves up to the world’s most extreme CO2 savings targets as a vote catcher, and who now find that the targets are impossible to meet). As winter comes nigh, there are renewed pushes to achieve heroic levels of insulation. The downsides of excessive insulation need to be spread about more widely
cO2 doesn’t make you stupid.. The propaganda about it does
I cannot see double-blind – so that those blending the gas should not know (beforehand) the actual level in the experiment chamber.
I think we’ve seen that the real problem here is all that nasty CO2 produced by people breathing.
There is no safe level of exposure to Second Hand People. Second Hand People are Dangerous To Your Health. The only solution is to ban them from pubs and other public places. Once they are confined safely in their homes the world will be much safer.
The problem is that they routinely use one of their four excretory functions (defecation, perspiration, urination, respiration) to exhale waste products into the air that the rest of us depend on for life. Those excretions include formaldehyde (used to preserve corpses), acetone (nail polish remover), acetic acid, acetaldehyde, 3,000 or more deadly VOCs (volatile organic chemicals) and, of course, that perniciously poisonous CO2. While Breathers cannot be totally eliminated because of protective laws, SOMEthing must be done to control them. Please join your local branch of the VHEMT (Voluntary Human Extinction MovemenT) at VHEMT.org and get active for the good of our children. Thank you.
– MJM
Earl Smith says:
October 17, 2012 at 6:24 pm
As an ancient former submariner
Could Earl, or someone, clarify a point for me. The CO₂ levels given for an ssbn had a wide range varying down to zero. This is presumably because some of the measurements were taken next to the outlet from the scrubbers. Would that outlet be positioned where it would be of most benefit, e.g. the conning position, or simply where the designers could find a place to stick it?
Let’s try another expieriment. Same number & selection criteria for test subjects as the original. In groups of 4 put them in hyperbaric chambers for 2.5 hours per session for three sessions on the same day and reduce the atmospheric pressure to equivalents of 5,000 feeet, 10,000 feet and 15,000 feet. You would quickly observe people suffer progressively more serious symptoms and degradation of cognitive functioning. You would probably conclude that people cannot live above 10,000 feet without severe cognitve impairment (and constant headaches).
But they do; La Paz ranges from around 10,000 feet to over 13,000 feet, and people live even higher than that. 17,000 feet is the altitude above which US private pilots must have oxygen if not in a pressurized cockpit.
People adapt to lower oxygen levels over time. That’s been proven by thousands of years of human history. I have absolutely no doubt they can adapt to higher levels of CO2.
That being said, this type of study might be useful in setting targets for indoor CO2 levels for workpaces and public buildings.
Do they grow vegetables inside these subs? It would appear to be an ideal climate!
Fisk’s statement that “In our field we always had a DOGMA that etc etc..” immediately raises red flags about how “unexpected” the results really were. Shades of Lewandowsky here, I think.
As an ex-submariner (RN), I can see what the researchers are getting at. Nevertheless, levels of CO2 and other gases like oxygen were monitored hourly. We used CO2 scrubbers to keep the level of CO2 down to a minimum. Our primary concern was the level of CO2 should we need to conduct an escape. Levels of CO2 at 3% resulted in slowed thought processes. 6% seriously impaired thought and judgement. At 9% you were considered effectively comatose and at 12% – Dead. Moral of the story – Keep the CO2 level below 3%
Michael J. Kubat says: “…oxygen levels go down.”
I agree and would surmise that varying degrees of hypoxia would produce similar results. If they did not monitor for O2 then the study is trash.
There seems to some confusion about the different intelligences in play here and their purpose. Submariners have need of tightly focussed, process driven intelligence (something that seems not to be influenced by higher CO2 levels) whereas student intelligence of initiative and creativity in a stuffy classroom are impacted. Cognitive ability, or lack of, covers a wider spectrum than stupid or smart and is often dependent upon a given situation in both place and time…
Could this be like a high altitude test?
Test at Sea Level
Test at half a mile above seal level
Test at a mile above sea level
I’m sure someone in Denver isn’t dumber than someone in NYC. Now if you move someone from NYC to a mile high their cognitive ability will suffer in the short term. But given a little time to adapt to the change in altitude their cognitive ability will get back to what it was at sea level.
I’d bet if you let someone breath in 5,000 ppm for a week they will perform equal to what they perform at 390 ppm.
If not then people in Denver are dumber than the rest of us lower altitude people.
Tenuk says: “Conclusion: NASA recommends an upper limit of 5000 ppm for missions of one thousand days, assuming a total air pressure of one atmosphere. Higher levels are acceptable for missions of only a few days.”
Thus even more evidence that this Berkley study is bunk. Projecting from the study’s “initiative” for 2500, 5000 would have over 95 out of 100 astronauts stuck on the couch playing video games in the capsule’s basement and ignoring controller requests to come back to earth.
Apollo 13 astronauts experienced levels approaching 20,000 ppm CO2 for several days, (plus hypoxia and hypo-thermia), but they still managed to make the right decisions and execute tasks to make it back alive.
I didn’t see it in this article or in the linked press release, but with all three trials occurring in the same day, which order were they done in? If they started with low CO2 and ended with high CO2, was the drop off in performance really due to CO2 concentration, or was it due to sitting in a boring situation for a day? I would expect to see a statistically significant falloff in performance between the first 2.5hr test and the last 2.5hr test done on the same day regardless of CO2 levels.
Louis says:
October 17, 2012 at 4:00 pm
They did the “study” in one day, which means the order they conducted the sessions could have a big effect on the outcome. What they may have been measuring is how much better people think in the morning before they become bored, weary, or hungry. If they conducted the last session right after lunch when the blood rushes to the digestive track and people get the urge to nap, it would likely have had a negative effect on the results. They need to conduct the experiment again in a different order and see if the results are the same. I suspect they won’t be.
I agree.
Simply performing the essentially same test session repeatedly may get differeing results.
Performing the sessions over multiple tays, varying the order, and comparing the results to both the same group and multiple other same sized, like groups, would be more useful.
At this point, in my opinion, the information is not even preliminary and should not be promulgated.
Releasing this information at this stage is embarrassing too the “researchers” (sic) and the facility.
Darn, spell check accidentially submitted my reply.
🙁
Amazing how the modern scientist is willing to admit intelligence and its synonyms are measurable, but only in certain contexts. Elsewhere it is taboo.
I don’t see any mention of acclimation over time. When one is subject to an altered breathing atmosphere (such as found at high altitudes), it can take days or weeks to acclimate. Humans can adjust/adapt to it’s environment over time. They should have allowed for such. GK
I have to be very sceptical of these results. 24 subjects? All done in a day? And they justify this by saying that the effects are so large that they can be observed in even a tiny population study.
But if the effects are so large that they are unmistakable even in a tiny population, then how come nobody has seen them before? That is the problem. Unbelievable.
If they had performed tests on thousands of subjects over a couple of years and then said there was a slight but significant impairment, then I might have accepted the results. But not this.
Surely the US Navy would not raise the oxygen level in subs because of the increased fire risk in a warship?
How does the inside of that submarine not melt down due to the millions of degrees temperature due to such high levels of CO2 (8000 ppm)???? /sarc
The sad reality is that it is CO2 obsession and AGW extremism that impairs judgement.