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December 24, 2019 03:30 am

The Human Brain Evolved When Carbon Dioxide Was Lower

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: Kris Karnauskas, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of Colorado, has started walking around campus with a pocket-size carbon-dioxide detector. He's not doing it to measure the amount of carbon pollution in the atmosphere. He's interested in the amount of CO2 in each room. The indoor concentration of carbon dioxide concerns him -- and not only for the usual reason. Karnauskas is worried that indoor CO2 levels are getting so high that they are starting to impair human cognition. In other words: Carbon dioxide, the same odorless and invisible gas that causes global warming, may be making us dumber. He proposed the idea last week at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, the largest annual gathering of earth and space scientists in the world. He also previewed it in an online paper written with Shelly Miller, a mechanical-engineering professor at the University of Colorado, and Anna Schapiro, a neuroscience professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The paper, while not yet peer-reviewed, was uploaded to a website where academics can discuss early-stage or provocative research. The science is, at first glance, surprisingly fundamental. Researchers have long believed that carbon dioxide harms the brain at very high concentrations. [...] Two centuries of rampant fossil-fuel use have already spiked the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to about 410 parts per million today. For Earth as a whole, that pollution traps heat in the atmosphere and causes climate change. But more locally, it also sets a baseline for indoor levels of carbon dioxide: You cannot ventilate a room's carbon-dioxide levels below the global average. In fact, many rooms have a much higher CO2 level than the atmosphere, since ventilation systems don't work perfectly. On top of that, some rooms -- in places such as offices, hospitals, and schools -- are filled with many breathing people, that is, many people who are themselves exhaling carbon dioxide. "As the amount of atmospheric CO2 keeps rising, indoor CO2 will climb as well," the report adds. "They project that, in a worst-case emissions scenario, it may be impossible to ventilate a crowded room below about 1,300 parts per million. That could induce some real cognitive damage." The report goes on to cite a 2016 study by researchers at Harvard and Syracuse University, which found that human cognitive function declined by about 15 percent when indoor CO2 reached 945 parts per million, and crashed by 50 percent when indoor CO2 reached 1,400 parts per million.

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