David Degenhardt In my school in norway the co2 content in the best part of the room as 1200ppm and if it wasn’t above 1600ppm they didn’t do anything about it.
I measured my schools CO2 levels a while back. Specifically because I found myslef a lot more sleepy, unatttentive and short of breath in some specific classrooms (mainly our math wing upstairs) it was around 5000 PPM in the worst places and about 1000 in the best
Just an idea here, but it might be good if you were to write up a short report on how those CO2 levels can affect the cognitive ability, citing the studies mentioned by Kurtis for your sources. Perhaps you could even suggest some solutions. Hand a copy in to your head of Science or your head teacher etc. I'm sure a well-written report with good sources and solid information will get noticed. You might just make a difference, and hey, who knows what doors it might open for you if somebody notices.
Is your area surrounded by mountains? If yes then you may have worse CO2 levels than people living in a bigger city on a flat plain because the wind can sweep away all the CO2. I live in a mountainous part of my country with lots of trees on the hills but we still have worse air quality than the capital and the biggest city which is located on a grassy flat area.
I didn't expect to feel this breathless. As someone who has lived in relative isolation in a 1 room homeless hostel for 8 years with anti suicide windows that only open 4 inches, and the absolutely devastating cognitive decline I've observed over that near decade, this seems like a legitimate piece of it.
After watching this video I purchased a C02 detector out of curiosity. In my living room the reading was 843 which is quite high but not dangerous. After having the window open 60mm roughly 2.5 inches (I measured it for you!) open the reading has dropped to 536. So I wouldn't worry too much. If anyone is an overthinker like me I did a reading outside and it was 475 which is decent. Thank god for covid !
@lazyshit67 All cities are polluted, industrial ones with tons of traffic the most. 9/10 people breathe polluted air. Even masks won't have, you could be out in Beijing for a day with those really strong masks and you'd end up blowing black stuff out of your nose. Air pollution is a serious issue in every part of the world, but many of the cities with the most pollution are in China, India etc., but the air would still eventually spread out.
@lazyshit67 these megacities in China are polluted as literally millions of people live in such a small space. Cars are often not very efficient with fuel and there is always something being build in a city like that. More modern cities have more rich people which means they get better cars better ventilated housed and there is more green.
@@master1900mcAAAAXXXTULY only a tiny minority of people lived in caves. Caves are very hard to come by and are usually inhabited by other animals. I was surprised when I found this out.
My god! This makes so much sense! I'm a audio production engineer in an old office building, my recording booths have no ventilation in them! I am always seeing people stumble their words progressively more the longer they stay in there, woooooow I've been trying to get ventilation installed for ages, NOW I HAVE A STUDY TO BASE A CASE ON THANKS GANG
Teacher:”Why won’t you step away from the window?” Me:”If I were to step away from this position I would experience an immediate 40% drop in my deductive reasoning skills.”
@@katsuover Dude 1 is a fictional character for the purpose of making a joke, so is dude 2 neither reference the real people in the video. Stop being dumb.
In my school, we have a CO2 meter in every classroom. The idea behind it is to open up a window if it is too much. Most teachers don't even bother looking at it, most of the time it is at 4400 in alarming red. This is where i have to learn...
Don't worry about learning, that's not what school is for. I mean, look at every other property of school from chair design to group size, none of that could possibly be designed for educational purposes.
Gas detection system technician here. To put this video in perspective, the systems we supply to monitor for CO2 leakage in pressurised beverage dispensing systems work over a range of 0-5% Volume, equivalent to 50,000ppm. We set alarm thresholds at 1.5% (15,000ppm) to set off a visual warning strobe, at this concentration you will pass out within a couple of minutes. A "high level" threshold at 3% (30,000ppm) sets off a warning siren, since this kind of concentration can kill you very quickly in a confined space. CO2 is heavier than air, so any sensor must be installed near ground level at the lowest point in the cellar to warn of gradual CO2 buildup.
I remember being back in school years ago and feeling ill and tired so much, this explains it. We had no ac and weren't allowed to open windows because it was a considered a distraction. We also had to ask permission to take off our blazers while the classroom was boiling. I swear prisoners had more rights than we did.
@@drlukas4242 our was same as op If we opened it the principal would send us to Detention and the Detention tomm had no windows and there was 3 to four kids there also. Then the worst part. It was a small room. I once passed out in it
I've wondered about this with respect to shopping malls since the 70s. Every time I've been in a giant shopping mall I end up feeling light headed and "out of it". I am fine once back outside. I always wondered if their mostly airtight construction, including double doors at all the entrances, caused the CO2 level to rise inside.
They are supposed to be ventilated but I too share that experience, being inside a shopping mall is torture, it's impossible to think in a place like that and after a few minutes the head ache sets in
Yep certain stores (especially if they're below ground level) give me these symptoms. I wonder if some people are more sensitive to it or experience different symptoms because I can't imagine every shopper is nauseous
I know what you mean! I used to think I’m just tired from dodging the masses of people and all the advertisements trying to catch my attention but maybe it was much simpler than that!
@@smelltheglove2038 They were not plastic. Unless some parents were lobotomized by the MAGA movement and gave the kid a clear one. EDIT: I stand corrected. While standard surgical masks (what most people used) are made of spun fleece, N95 masks are made of polypropylene *fibers.* So yes, they are plastic, but turned into threads and woven together to make a tightly-porous fabric
@@smelltheglove2038 huge difference between masks and bags, you'll die if you wore a plastic bag on your head for 6 hours a day, you'll be safer if you wore masks in school.
The moment he started listing the side effects was when everything clicked, such as why it's nearly impossible to think normally in some classrooms and not in others, or at home compared to at school or a library. My high school had zero windows and the ones that were there had no way of opening, were usually covered, and there was never more than one in a classroom. It's literally the layout of a prison and in some classrooms it's almost intoxicating to stay in whereas others feel relaxing or lets your mind think clearer depending on the location. American schools are not the greatest and yet that's still not even the biggest problem or threat they have to face. Honestly a big part of me wonders just how much of a difference it would've made going to school in another country or out in the country with less students and more air, light, or fear.
Far from Irrational Cloth masks don’t make that big of a difference. Otherwise doctors would suffer like this during operations which they obviously don’t.
My science classes have these sensors, the teachers are supposed to turn the fans on at over 1000ppm, but they don't bother as they are load and disrupt the class. The ppm often reaches 6500ppm. Probably not good for us.
Definitely not good... I mean, might* not cause you long term harm - but Horrible place for the brain to try and learn things. Your classroom is not alone in that either :/
I did a search and found that the peak CO2 levels on Apollo 13 before they implemented the canister hack, highlighted by the scene in the movie, were 19,600 ppm. Wow.
Stale air, *can explain bad school performance :-)* and when in dense traffic. Thx. to this experiment we can learn for how to make our world better. This experiment is a good demonstration for poorly ventilated schools, offices, and space stations :-)
In his book Endurance, astronaut Scott Kelly talks about wanting to reduce the accepted CO2 levels on the ISS as it gave him a headache. Not the situation where you want your cognition to be impacted.
I work in a clean room where we have something like 600 air exchanges an hour. I work 7 on 7 off and the whole off week is just my body and lungs trying to deal with non stop shitty air. It’s almost nice to get back to work and suddenly breathe clear and easy again! Its hard to imagine so many people live having no idea what it’s like to breathe nothing but purified, filtered, and calculated for quality top tier air… people would actually realize how polluted their community’s air is.
I can attest to this, at my university some (if not most) levture halls are not ventilated properly, after about 30 min of lecture you can physically feel how it’s harder to think, people in the room start to complain about the bad air and if possible we try to open windows. Still blows my mind how every damn hall can be so poorly designed, especially when some of our classes involve airflow. It’s like ”here’s the skills you need to properly ventilate a room. Do we use this in practice? Naaah, that would be too expensive!”
Solution: most lecture halls I've seen have at least 2 doors. Open 2 of them on opposing sides of the room, thrown a fan in one of them (Blowing in or out) and now you have airflow. Also, I have not studied this and if it would not work please let me know.
That empathy warning at the start is fascinating. Are there really that many humans that can subconsciously mimic a physiological state just by watching that state in others?
somewhat. as someone who's experienced panic attacks, watching videos of others, take for example those ambulance documentaries where there is a film crew within the ambulance, others being in the same distress sort of triggers something in me. i can't watch them without feeling nauseous and reliving the same feelings i went through. but this is when i've EXPERIENCED the same thing they have. i watched it to test things out on myself. being trapped in an air tight bubble? depends - not many, if any at all have tried or done that. i believe you resonate with someone's feelings more if you are more on the empathetic side; my sister can't handle tending to certain kittens due to the state they're in without breaking down, urgent or not. she's an empath. this video could effect other empaths with certain triggers.
I'm so glad to find out that it's not just me being silly or hypersensitve (at least not completely) when I feel that I can not concentrate or be productive in poorly ventilated classrooms and the like. At bad moments, it also massively tends to add to my levels of anxiety, especially when coupled with high temperatures and humidity.
@@ScopeofScience They should but they can't really fix it. There are 30-34 students in a classroom and the doors are closed (because... Winter). The best thing is that it starts beeping at 5000 ppm. The threshold used to be at 3000 ppm but they decided the 'solution' was to increase the limit... *sigh*
@@AbsoluteTVYT I think if enough people were concerned enough they Would fix it. We need to think and talk as if we can make the changes we need to make. This is our children's future, in more ways than one. Not trying to give you a hard time, I just think its important how we frame these issues.
I used to work at McDonald's, they placed the sensors as far away from the grills as possible (they would pay off the inspectors) and the levels would still routinely reach over 2000 ppm, until my bosses got tired of hearing the alarm and ripped the wires out
Oh yeah, there are definitely parts of the world where 4,000 ppm CO2 would be the *_preferable_* option the majority of the time. I often forget how fortunate I am where I live!
Our small classroom, which can fit 40 chairs and a teacher's table, was so suffocating when we were moving around. There were windows on one side but the other 3 sides were just walls (1 for the blackboard). I'm still amazed that 41 people would stay inside for 4 hours on average (except on recess and lunch breaks).
This puts global warming into a whole new perspective. I was never all that scared of it. Always knew it was a problem, but was never afraid. The fact that it is making the human race DUMBER is what scares me. I mean, even dumber than we already are? We're doomed!
Global warming isn't what causes this, but what _causes_ global warming is what causes this. It's the polution that people are complaining about when they are talking about Global Warming. They say the pollution creates a layer of gasses in the atmosphere that blocks the sunlight's heat from escaping the atmosphere, warming the Earth. That same pollution is also what causes the amount of carbon dioxide in the air to increase, which is the problem explained in the video.
@@bigglyguy8429 It's not considered a pollutant strictly in the sense that it is naturally produced by humans and animals, and doesn't have significant negative effects in small amounts. However that does not mean it's always harmless, as shown in this video and evidenced by its effect on the global climate.
Not the best way to address the primary issue: CO2 being part of the air mixture. In a normal home it would result in overpressure and thus displacing some of the CO2 outside, but by doing so you'll be raising the partial pressure component of oxygen in the air a lot. Potentially to the point of toxic levels (also a slight fire hazard and all that). What you really need is a CO2 scrubber there are many ways to do this chemically, it's been done for ages in technical diving with rebreathers and many other fields (space, etc). In the simplest terms it'd allow you to reuse the exhaled air that still contains useful oxygen by chemically removing the CO2 adding a bit more oxygen, this allows you to get more use out of the limited oxygen bottles (exact processes per specialty will vary, diving rarely uses pure oxygen typically only an enriched mixture).
I’m depressed, I spend a lot of time in my apartment. I want to open up my windows to get as much fresh air in as possible, because even before this video, I was wondering about the drawbacks, and I could feel them too. But I don’t open my windows. Because if I do, I let in so much other bad stuff. For instance, the smoke from my neighbours who smoke cigarettes and something undertermined that smells more fruity on their balconies or in their apartments with open windows. The exhaust from the cars and trucks that drive on the road in front of my apartment building, as well as the cars unnecessarily idling down in front of the kiosk down beneath my apartment on the ground floor. And the chimney smoke, from a neighbouring house about 30 meters away on the other side of the road, which has a chimney about 2 meters lower than my apartment. Also, the noise from It all really gets to me. Especially young men in their fancy cars playing music loudly from their open car windows. I shouldn’t live in place like this. No one should live in a place like this. A place like this shouldn’t even exist in a modern world. This all sucks. I hate it. And just moving somewhere else even isn’t as easy as it sounds. And also, that still doesn’t fix anything. We really need to be better at taking care of the limited space that we all share within a city. And to me, it seems doable, but when I see how other people live, I quickly lose that hope. Good grief... So for now I remain in my apartment. Even having clogged up as many ventilation sources as possible. Still wondering which is worse to do? And why a clearly better alternative just isn’t present. Why must other people carelessly create so much bad air? So that I am faced with this unfortunate circumstance? It seems selfish, unfair and unnecessary.
I don't really mind all of that, i only suffer the consequences of letting 5029292838492202 trillion gazillion mosquitoes, flies, spiders and various other insects
@@lezmkasd Yes, I’m considering that, but it is expensive (I’m poor). But another thing that’s holding me back from doing so, is that ventilation/cooling/air purification devices are a big contributor to power usage and global warming. And to me, that’s a selfish luxury at the expense of the environment, that should be avoided as much as possible. Especially when opening a window in most cases could achieve the same effect without hurting the environment. But when other people hurt the viability of that option, then this situation happens, where we are inclined to selfishly use unnecessary power consumption. In the future at least, and even now I think, that is just not a good enough solution to rely on anymore. :/ But most people don’t know that, consider it, or in the worst and most often scenario, care. And I think that’s very unfortunate. :( It makes me wonder if I should even care? If anyone should even care? Should we just be casually ignorant or careless and just abuse the planet/environment till it is no longer pleasant to live on/in? Some people are surely doing that. But I find that very hard to just do. Makes me feel very selfish and down right dumb, when I even just entertain the thought.
That's what I'm looking into. Taping a HEPA filter over my box fan might be great for dust and allergens, but not remove CO2. But I've learned reading these and other articles that CO2 settles to the floor if undisturbed, and builds up like water. Picture that and open the door to let CO2 ride the cold air out the door a couple of times per day.
After watching this I went to my teachers (really the science teachers) and asked if maybe we could add some plants in the classrooms to help with the oxygen/CO2 levels. Turns out my school isn’t allowed to have plants outside of the green room, which students aren’t supposed to go into.
oh, that explains why I was getting difficulties in school and suddenly it was easy again when I switched to evening adult school. It had almost empty classes and empty aired pout classes after regular school. In uni sleepiness and difficulty to concentrate returned...
Same here. At home everything is so much easier to process while at school it just seems infinitely harder for easy questions. The school system is broken
This is a video I watched when it came out originally and ever since then multiple times a week I think about it again wondering what the air is like in my bedroom, especially with quarantine and it being my main work area.
I didn't get the same sense of life-threatening risk from watching Kurtis' series, but this video makes you *feel* the danger. Thanks for risking your life to bring awareness to climate change and air issues. I'm sure you (and us) will never feel the same way about air!
I'm a student in a old and big university in sweden and we had a cours named enviromental tachnology and ist about how we can make a better place to live in but not a single word whas mentiond about this and i think that is super weird. thanks for the good content!
After watching this video, i bought an air quality monitor, just 2 hours home from work in my living room and the c02 level is over 1300, explains the headaches i get around this time every night, i just thought it was not drinking enough water. Fascinating!
@Uncle Eidolf You can't claim that this video is propaganda without any evidence whatsoever to challenge the content you are accusing. That's ignorance. Please provide real evidence.
Pffft, climate change? That ain't real! I live and work in a high CO2 environment every day and I... can't remember what I was going to say. What are we talking about again?
Final Edit: I'm gonna add this to the top, so it's definitely read. Sorry, I misunderstood. I read some of the replies through and rewatched the video. I didn't think it through enough. I am sorry. I am keeping up my comments because I'm owning up to my mistake. Sorry! Climate change has nothing to with this. Why would it? Because it's CO2 in the air? Well. It's in the air. Regardless of whether it changes the temperature. Extra: climate change is real, because climates change. It's the sped up greenhouse effect that's been debated about. And whether it is our doing. Do not straight up connect the existence of CO2 in the atmosphere with temperature increase. Edit2: Apparently I have to also make sure to announce that I am not a denier. So; Im not a denier. Now please actually read what I'm saying aswell. Thank you.
A problem that has been plaguing schools here in Norway for decades as well, quite a few generations that got less out of school than they could have because of it. After watching this video Im now googling for an affordable detector of such low levels.
I bought a CO₂ meter a few years ago that measures up to 3000ppm. With my cell phone as a time lapse camera, I generated curves of how the air in my (rather small) bedroom changed when sleeping with the window closed, open, slightly open… With the window closed and me just sleeping, the concentration rose with about 250ppm per hour. That window hasn't often been fully closed ever since.
You'll be glad to know that a chemical engineer above says CO2 is slightly heavier than air, and will sink if undisturbed. So if your door has a wide opening at the bottom, CO2 should seep out. Or if you can crack the door when you sleep, it should flow out and downstairs if you're in a house. In winter it should ride the cold air currents like a river. And houses exchange air to some extent. Apartments, however, less so.
@@cypheri1339 7 months late but air conditioners do not transfer air to or from the outside at all. It circulates air already outside to make that air hotter, and circulates air already inside to make it cooler. It does this by moving refrigerant between the inside part and the outside part. Technology Connections has a video explaining this better than I can.
WangleLine ermmm... go ask your mother! But actually it’s when you smoke weed in a room or other closed space so that the smoke sort of circulates around to get everyone high.
That's so fascinating! Come to think of it, being chronically ill, my brainfog is probably not helped by the fact that I don't have a plant in the room I (by necessity) spend most of my time in. That's exactly the sort of science-driven thing that could genuinely help but which I, a bio student, somehow didn't even think was this much of an issue (despite some late-night window paranoia). Thank you so much for posting this!
So this was why they were so adamant with making sure the window vanes were open back in primary and secondary school. Kinda just something we did but never rly thought or would imagine just how much it impacted us and our learning/brains....
@@Aetherpon I didn't put an amazon link in the description because I don't want to encourage the world to buy more stuff... But I do want people to think about how to reduce their CO2 levels, so, maybe seeing it would help? Not sure... Sorry for rambling lol
@@ScopeofScience I want one TBH, if it's a portable one so I can put it in my car to see how the leves are there and stuff like that itd be ideal. If it's more than like 50€ dont bother though, I'll open a window hahahahaa
Interesting fact: Humans are actually adapting to better withstand low oxygen environments. Doesn’t mean we’ll be able to breath on Mars, but it means that, in the future, a 10-16% decrease might become less significant. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop this from happening though, just thought I’d share something cool.
I have always liked opening windows at home or school, and now I have a proper reason as to why we should do that, not just me. My family does not open windows at all, my dad's bedroom feels like a prison, it's hard to breathe. At school I am constantly told not to open the windows, then when I exit and come back in the room 5 minutes later the air is heavy, plus it smells bad. That's 25 people breathing the same air for 40 minutes, horrific. I think this is a problem everywhere, people need to know this.
I am having this problem in my office, there are six people in there and it smells bad, but if I open a window someone closes it when I come back because it's a bit cold, even though you can just put a coat on.
@@userPrehistoricman except you know, your heating system isn't exhausting CO2 directly into your apartment. Just open your window for a couple minutes to let all the air exchange, close it, and it'll warm back up quickly because your walls are still retaining plenty of heat. You really aren't throwing away much heat by doing that.
To be honest, I feel like I got used to that the longer I lived in a city. Coming from a small town in the middle of nature into a city, I felt these effect for a couple years but over time I really felt these effects less and less to the point I got used to them and feel as healthy as ever. :) Also decisionmaking in stressfull situations has been getting better and better for the past couple years. Maybe that's just me or maybe it's more comon?
This is really interesting. I’ve read that mouth-to-mouth resuscitation works well because the air we exhale is about 17% oxygen and “only” about 3-4% co2. That means the rescuer is pumping air into the rescued person’s lungs that is 30,000-40,000 ppm co2, which this video describes as very dangerous and potentially deadly. I guess it’s still better than no air circulation at all though. How long until there are major health effects? (Seconds? Minutes? Hours?)
Mouth to mouth really should last long enough for the CO2 concentration to have adverse effects. Especially since the far bigger issue would be the buildup of CO2 inside the body from it just using up all the oxygen.
Mouth to mouth is good in cases of drowning, when a person has his or her lungs filled with water. Forcing air into them helps the victim cough and expel that water. And with CPR, you help expel CO2 from the lungs. So you time the mouth to mouth as to avoid CO2 buildup.
Yeah, something people don't understand about CO2 is that plants can't do photosynthesis well if the levels are Too high, and they can only soak up so much so quickly... sigh...
@@ScopeofScience What is the explanation for the massive plant life boom during the Carboniferous period, where C02 levels were more than twice as high as right now?
@@Blueshirt38 No doubt plants like higher CO2 levels, even twice as much as we have today...to a degree. The problem is that it also reduces their nutritional value, their photosynthesis, and generally also increases their needs for other nutrients and water. In other words, plants would suffer too at some point, but not nearly as much as us while the planet is drying out more and we get fewer nutrients.
@@SaHaRaSquad Do you have any citations for that? I have looked into that, and it seems that the opposite is true.. The closest thing research I can find to that theory is that certain species of bivalves have lower stomatal conductance with high CO2 for extended periods of time, but most plants thrive overall. The only other factor that attributes to plants possibly favoring lower CO2 environments is that it is less favorable for animals overall, which leads to lower nutrient levels in landlocked soil, and but more nutrient rich oceans.
Most plants use carbon dioxide *ONLY* during the day in conjunction with Photosynthesis; at night they use oxygen, due to the lack of sunlight. So be careful of which plants you use to store yourself in a box.
Ha! My plant hobby is good for me! Maybe not for my bank account, but the over 2 dozen houseplants in my bachelor apartment are helping me breathe!! Ha! (Especially bc I can't exactly open a window when it's -35°C.... Canadian winters are rough)
