The Human Brain Evolved When Carbon Dioxide Was Lower

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Exposing the Big Game's avatarThe Extinction Chronicles

There is substantial but inconsistent evidence that as carbon-dioxide levels rise, they could affect human cognition.

ROBINSON MEYER

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Pedestrians are seen wearing masks as smoke haze from bushfires in New South Wales blankets the central business district in Sydney.
Australia’s bushfires choked Sydney with soot and have emitted about 195 million tons of carbon dioxide this year, equivalent to half of the country’s normal carbon-emissions footprint.REUTERS
SAN FRANCISCO—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…

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