[Rockhounds] The Human Brain Evolved When Carbon Dioxide Was Lower

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

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.

“I did this at home, just having fun with it, and in a bedroom overnight it
can get over 1,000 parts per million very quickly,” he told me. Even *here*,
he added—gesturing at the city-block-size basement of the Moscone
Convention Center, filled with thousands of earth scientists milling about
their discipline’s giant annual science fair—the CO₂ probably exceeds 500
parts per million.

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.

“This is a hidden impact of climate change … that could actually impact our
ability to solve the problem itself,” he said.

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
<https://eartharxiv.org/b8umq> written with Shelly Miller
<https://www.colorado.edu/even/people/shelly-miller>, a
mechanical-engineering professor at the University of Colorado, and Anna
Schapiro <https://psychology.sas.upenn.edu/people/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not yet peer-reviewed, was uploaded to a website where academics can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.


https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/carbon-dioxide-pollution-making-people-dumber-heres-what-we-know/603826/