FUTURE HUMAN
How Climate Change Is Ruining Our Indoor Air
It would take an unreasonable amount of plants to balance rising CO2 levels being found at home, school, and work
What’s the most important number in the world? Bill McKibben thinks it’s 350. The environmental activist co-founded 350.org, a climate advocacy group, as a way to popularize the finding of a 2008 paper: CO2 in the atmosphere will need to be reduced to at most 350 parts per million “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed…” We were at around 280 ppm before we began to burn coal, oil, and gas en masse. This April, we reached 410 ppm.
Yet it is a little appreciated fact that many of us at home, school, and work breathe air containing CO2 concentrations of 1,000 ppm every day. It’s because the air we exhale holds around a hundred times more CO2 — about 40,000 ppm — than the air we inhale. Badly ventilated classrooms and overcrowded conference rooms can reach 2,000 ppm, well above the point when air starts to feel “stuffy,” at 600 ppm. Concentrations above that can cause classic symptoms of CO2 poisoning: labored breathing, headaches, rapid pulse rate, hearing loss, hyperventilation, sweating, and fatigue.
