3 ms·
That's intuitively appealing but when you look at the numbers it's almost certainly false. When CO2 goes from 400 ppm to 1000 ppm then oxygen will go from 2100
by Symmetry 8y ago
That's intuitively appealing but when you look at the numbers it's almost certainly false. When CO2 goes from 400 ppm to 1000 ppm then oxygen will go from 21000 ppm to 20400 ppm, a 3% drop which isn't going to be enough to change anything.
- greenleaf2 8y agoNo, the body does not use the same amount of oxygen, as the amount of CO2 it exhales. The amount of oxygen used is way higher. A person consumes 19 cubic feet of oxygen a day. Edit: I looked at the composition of inhaled and exhaled air, and now I realize the reason O2 is being taken out of the air in higher amounts than CO2 is introduced, is that the exhaled amount of carbon dioxide is not the total amount of carbon dioxide that has been created in the body. When the CO2 in the room gets higher, more CO2 is actually taken up again from the room back into the human body, with the exhale rate staying relatively constant. Or in other words, a significant part of the increase in CO2 in the system human <-> room is actually in the human, not in the room. The room measurement thus covers only a part of the CO2 being produced in total, and only the unknown total amount of CO2 produced reflects the totality of O2 being used up. This means a change of 1000 ppm of CO2 in the air will mean a higher amount of oxygen has been used up.
- tasty_freeze 8y agoOxygen is 21% of the atmosphere, so 210000 ppm, not 21000 ppm.