Rising CO2 causes more than a climate crisis—it may directly harm our ability to think
Monday, April 20, 2020
As the 21st century progresses, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations will cause urban and indoor levels of the gas to increase, and that may significantly reduce our basic decision-making ability and complex strategic thinking, according to a new CU Boulder-led study. By the end of the century, people could be exposed to indoor CO2 levels up to 1400 parts per million—more than three times today’s outdoor levels and well beyond what humans have ever experienced.
“It’s amazing how high CO2 levels get in enclosed spaces,” said Kris Karnauskas, CIRES Fellow, associate professor at CU Boulder and lead author of the new study published today in the AGU journal GeoHealth. “It affects everybody—from little kids packed into classrooms to scientists, business people and decision makers to regular folks in their houses and apartments.”
Shelly Miller, professor in CU Boulder’s school of engineering and coauthor adds that “building ventilation typically modulates CO2 levels in buildings, but there are situations when there are too many people and not enough fresh air to dilute the CO2.” CO2 can also build up in poorly ventilated spaces over longer periods of time, such as overnight while sleeping in bedrooms, she said.
Put simply, when we breathe air with high CO2 levels, the CO2 levels in our blood rise, reducing the amount of oxygen that reaches our brains. Studies show that this can increase sleepiness and anxiety, and impair cognitive function.
We all know the feeling: Sit too long in a stuffy, crowded lecture hall or conference room and many of us begin to feel drowsy or dull. In general, CO2 concentrations are higher indoors than outdoors, the authors wrote. And outdoor CO2 in urban areas is higher than in pristine locations. The CO2 concentrations in buildings are a result of both the gas that is otherwise in equilibrium with the outdoors, and also the CO2 generated by building occupants as they exhale.
Atmospheric CO2 levels have been rising since the Industrial Revolution, reaching a 414 ppm peak at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in 2019. In the ongoing scenario in which people on Earth do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts outdoor CO2 levels could climb to 930 ppm by 2100. And urban areas typically have around 100 ppm CO2 higher than this background.
Karnauskas and his colleagues developed a comprehensive approach that considers predicted future outdoor CO2 concentrations and the impact of localized urban emissions, a model of the relationship between indoor and outdoor CO2 levels and the impact on human cognition. They found that if the outdoor CO2 concentrations do rise to 930 ppm, that would nudge the indoor concentrations to a harmful level of 1400 ppm.
“At this level, some studies have demonstrated compelling evidence for significant cognitive impairment,” said Anna Schapiro, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a coauthor on the study. “Though the literature contains some conflicting findings and much more research is needed, it appears that high level cognitive domains like decision-making and planning are especially susceptible to increasing CO2 concentrations.”
In fact, at 1400 ppm, CO2 concentrations may cut our basic decision-making ability by 25 percent, and complex strategic thinking by around 50 percent, the authors found.
Damn typing skills: crown should be crowd
The authors are off by a factor of 10.
1000 to 1500 ppm CO2 is not significant to mammalian physiology.
Medical people generally know that there is no problem at 10000 ppm (1%)
Most people don’t notice anything at that level.
US health regulators, NIOSH, OSHA and CO2 MSDS say any concentration below 5000 ppm is not significant for people working 8 hours at that level.
Medical anesthesiology research in the 1930s experimented with CO2. For example
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/242713
10 percent CO2 caused subjects to become unconscious within 10 minutes.
Scuba divers learn what CO2 levels can become a concern, but that’s a special case due to the pressures and other gas problems.
US submarine crews are well aware of potential adverse impact of CO2. I don’t remember the exact number, but the air monitor system did have a programmed alarm level. Maybe 1 percent. Normal operation was variable depending on crew activity levels.
Come on Loydo, get typing.
A thread like this is nothing of a thread without your pearls of wisdom.
“more than three times today’s outdoor levels and well beyond what humans have ever experienced.”
The amount of CO2 in your lungs varies between 20 000 ppm and 50,000 ppm during the breathing cycle, if you exhale very forcefully you can momentarily get it down to 10 000 ppm. No human has ever experienced lower CO2 levels than that.
Incidentally the breathing reflex is entirely tied to the CO2 level which is why hypoxia is so insidious, you don’t feel anything much, you just “fall asleep”.
That’s a key point.
The real solution is to get rid of the oxygen thieves. They take the oxygen to convert to CO2. To add insult to injury, their hyperventilating and getting in to a chicken little type flap creates even more CO2 and takes ever more oxygen. Alas, their stupidity is so contageous(as bad as COVID) that it is becoming an overwhelmingly fatal cancer.
My current pet dog thrives sleeping under the bed covers, sheet & blankets. When I 1st got it I had some anxious moments unbundling it at night to check it was O.K.
The animal probably is taking advantage of the way high CO2 levels in the lungs sustains high O2 levels inside tissue cells. Increased intake of cubic mm CO2/ hour gives the highest daily NAD+ levels since there is then relatively more NADH usage in the NAD+:NADH ratio.
It seems the dog, on a grain free diet, is not performing as much cellular glycolysis since that would have been using more NAD+(in Krebs cycle). The mitochondrial electron transport chain is what uses a lot of NADH & cellular oxygen is required there for dealing with electrons.
Rising CO2 causes more than a climate crisis—it may directly harm our ability to think?
Reading this, one may presume that it already has…
“By the end of the century, people could be exposed to indoor CO2 levels up to 1400 parts per million—more than three times today’s outdoor levels and well beyond what humans have ever experienced. ”
So ….. those on subs and in airplanes are not humans …
😉
Ironically, other “green” initiatives such as LEED certification may actually degrade indoor air quality (IAQ) including CO2 concentraiton, particularly when retrofitting older buildings.
“As another common example, outdoor air supply rates may be reduced in order to promote energy efficiency but without compensatory actions such as source control. This can increase concentration of pollutants indoors and reduce IAQ, especially in existing buildings that undergo renovation and retrofit. Tightening of building envelopes can also reduce outdoor air supply rates, which can reduce IAQ, if the volume of air that is infiltrating indoors is not brought back out by the ventilation system or if pollution sources are not concurrently reduced.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360132316304346
Can you actually think? If CO2 goes from 400ppm to 1400ppm, then O2 goes from 210,000 to 209,000ppm. You really think that can affect anybody? That’s roughly 130 feet height difference!
Some years ago I was asked to do some finance consultancy work on a hydroponic tomato farm in central New South Wales. At the time I believe it was the third largest in Australia.
In the centre of the infrastructure there was a tower about 25 m high (from memory) this tower stored water which was continually heated night and day by a gas furnace. At night the hot water was piped through the glasshouse to keep the temperature from getting too low and inhibiting the growth of the plants. The exhaust gas from the gas furnace was treated to convert the monoxide to dioxide and exhausted into the glasshouse night and day. I don’t remember how high the CO2 concentration was but I remember being very surprised when I was told.
There was a team of about thirty women of varying ages working eight hour days in the glasshouse. Some were or had been pregnant.
The point. These children were perfectly normal academically, with a cross section of them going onto universities across Australia. No cognative disability on a developing foetus.
We don’t need higher levels of CO2 concentration to permanently impair cognitive function in Americans. We have the progressive public school systems already doing the job quite well.
50 years ago Apollo 13 had to jury rig a lithium hydroxide scrubber (square peg round hole) because the carbon dioxide alarm was triggered, what was the concentration that triggered the alarm? In the film it was referred to as 15, which I presume is 15000 ppm.
This a COSHH (control of substances hazardous to health) sheet for carbon dioxide
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/fdsimages/MD101+COSHH+Assessment+Carbon+Dioxide.pdf
which shows an eight hour limit of 5000 ppm.
This is from the U.K. health and safety executive https://www.hse.gov.uk/carboncapture/carbondioxide.htm
Also https://www.hse.gov.uk/carboncapture/assets/docs/major-hazard-potential-carbon-dioxide.pdf
Apollo 13
How were those guys able to construct their improvised CO2 filter with all that cognitive impairment going on?
More doom and gloom prognostications. I think nature has a natural balancing mechanism that damps this effect. I suspect over time we will start to understand what it is. Most like it will be very complicated to the point we know it is happening but can’t fully model it.
The reason that CO2 levels are high in buildings is because of the efforts to be energy efficient during the oil crises. After that, buildings were designed to eliminate losses of heat (or cooling). A much higher percentage of the air is recirculated and buildings are now much better sealed from air leakage. In fact, back in the 1990s, there had to be an effort to increase the amount of fresh air and decrease the amount of recirculated air in buildings because the success of sealing the buildings led to negative effects of indoor air pollution on the occupants of the buildings.