
Indoor CO2 could cut our capacity for complex, strategic thinking: study - belltaco
https://news.yahoo.com/carbon-dioxide-homes-offices-classrooms-131700552.html
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sparker72678
> So Karnauskas worked with a mechanical engineer and a cognitive
> neuroscientist to make back-of-the-envelope calculations based on the
> Harvard findings and projections about rising carbon-dioxide emissions.

> 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.

~~~
MertsA
Yeah I really don't get how we're supposed to interpret "50% lower".
Intelligence is barely ordinal to begin with. Also ventilation when done
properly isn't just some fixed rate, we already target air changes per hour
and CO2 levels to prevent indoor air in an office environment from becoming
too stagnant. This just means we would need to increase the ventilation, not
that it wouldn't work at all.

~~~
missosoup
> we already target air changes per hour and CO2 levels to prevent indoor air
> in an office environment from becoming too stagnant

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...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/08/indoor-
carbon-dioxide-levels-could-be-a-health-hazard-scientists-warn)

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tgsovlerkhgsel
In my experience, lack of proper ventilation is a much bigger problem than
background CO2 levels.

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.

~~~
tu7001
You're right, this is joke, or we're missing something.

~~~
Omnitaus
They're missing something. Right below, in the same article:

"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.

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vanusa
My company doesn't pay me for my capacity for "complex, strategic" thinking.

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.

~~~
rytill
(Not that I disagree with the sentiment) What office layout would you prefer?

~~~
vanusa
A lot like my house, actually.

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npo9
Imagine paying to have extra oxygen inserted into homes, schools, and offices.
To offset CO2 levels. Or perhaps we will use CO2 scrubbers. This will further
increase the division between the haves and have-nots because it puts a higher
price tag on cognitive abilities.

~~~
thrower123
Or we could just stick a few house plants in each room...

~~~
npo9
Has anyone measured how big of an impact plants have on C02 levels in a room?

I’d imagine it wouldn’t do much, but perhaps large amounts of other biomass
might help.

~~~
veemjeem
Supposedly a single human produce around 300g of carbon per day in the form of
carbon dioxide. A tree's dry weight is about 50% carbon, but when the tree is
alive, it's probably still 80% water. So I'm approximately guessing that a
tree needs to grow 3kg per day to offset a single human's CO2 production. I
don't think there are many plants that grow at a rate of 3kg per day -- you'd
probably need 500 indoor plants making 6g of mass per day.

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.

~~~
npo9
It’s also easy to imagine some combination of biotech and genetic engineering
can make a biomass capable of being 5x-10x as capable of capturing carbon as
your hydroponic basil. Most likely basil isn’t the most efficient “natural”
biomass generating plant either.

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cycop
I have a desk CO2 monitor , it averages between 800 to 1000 in my home office
during the day. Anyone else monitor their own environment or know if their
office does? Are people even interested in this type of monitoring?

~~~
MuffinFlavored
How can one get rid of the CO2 around your home office/desk during the day?

~~~
BubRoss
Open a window

~~~
lucb1e
Yeah so I'm of two minds about this: I want fresh air, and I don't want to
waste energy (not for the money but for climate reasons) by opening a window
all day and trying to heat up 0-10°C outside air to a temperature that is
comfortable when all you do is sitting still (22°C).

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?

~~~
sp332
A long-term solution is to install a ventilator with a heat exchanger.
Outgoing air on one side of a thin metal plate warms up incoming air on the
other side. This covers about 50% of the temperature difference for free.

~~~
lucb1e
I didn't know that was a thing. It looks like most are 250 euros or even
double that. It's a fan with a metal plate right?! Or is there some built in
fridge-like construction to exchange the heat?

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.

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ChikkaChiChi
Can anyone recommend a decent CO2 and VOC monitor for a desktop? It'd be great
to have something to help tell me when I need to improve the ventilation.

~~~
dementik
I am running ESPHome on ESP8266, sensor is MH-Z19B.

You can also run Tasmota firmware on ESP8266 which means you can easily
monitor CO2 value from your browser.

~~~
cjbprime
Looks neat, I wonder if you could get it down small enough to run on something
wearable like a watch-style device.

~~~
Youden
For tVOCs and inaccurate, inferred CO2 readings, absolutely. Sensors like the
BME680 or SGP30 are ~4mm square.

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.

~~~
cjbprime
Thanks for the answer.

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txprog
Shameless plug here. I'm working for [https://cozyair.fr](https://cozyair.fr)
\- keeping a good indoor air quality is good for both the user but also the
the building.

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.

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simulate
Scott Alexander of Slatestarcodex provided some anecdotal evidence of this
issue last year:

> 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...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/23/carbon-dioxide-an-open-door-
policy/)

------
CamperBob2
[https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/17/claim-co2-makes-
you-s...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/17/claim-co2-makes-you-stupid-
as-a-submariner-that-question/)

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.)

~~~
audunw
> Please consider reading the article, then moderating the comment.

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=...](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-019-0071-6.pdf?proof=true&draft=collection)

"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.

