And shouldn’t CO2 levels closely track various aspects of weather?
Shoud they? Weather is basically temperature + precipitation + wind + humidity. Off the top of my head I don’t see any reasons why different weather should imply different CO2 concentrations.
Photosynthesis requires light to occur; weather affects the amount of light. Direction of wind determines the amount of upwind plants, and so on. Here’s a link to a week’s worth of data from an outdoor CO2 monitor in Utah; it looks to me like the difference is probably imperceptible, even if one buys the effect sizes for the 600 to 1000 ppm study.
I was actually thinking more along the lines of opening windows; you only want your windows open in a fairly narrow band of temperatures, and things like precipitation would also encourage people to seal their houses or apartments or offices up and presumably increase carbon dioxide levels. But yeah, there are probably direct effects from light levels and barometric pressure and other things.
Weather clearly affects people in a lot of ways, do disentangling the CO2 effects will be hard.
Any idea how high will CO2 go in a room in a normal building, say during winter in a well-sealed residential house? Offices and apartments buildings typically have HVAC systems which have standards for air exchange and such, but a single-family house can do whatever it wants to, including turning itself into an airtight box in the name of energy efficiency...
Weather clearly affects people in a lot of ways, do disentangling the CO2 effects will be hard.
Weather affects people, but as I said, the effects generally seem to be small and not as large as the experiment claims. If there were large weather effects, they could be due to CO2 or other aspects of weather; but since there are not, that implies that all aspects of weather including CO2 are not that important. (Modus ponens, modus tollens, etc.)
I don’t know about that. Anecdotally, I know some people who say that how well they think/work/feel is noticeably—to them—affected by weather, mostly a combination of pressure and humidity. Also anecdotally, the older you get, the more sensitive to weather your body becomes.
Myself, I feel more energetic in high-pressure low-humidity weather than in low-pressure high-humidity, but I haven’t tried to quantify it or be rigorous about it.
Anecdotally, I know some people who say that how well they think/work/feel is noticeably—to them—affected by weather, mostly a combination of pressure and humidity. Also anecdotally, the older you get, the more sensitive to weather your body becomes.
The attempt to find weather correlations universal to all humans seems misguided to me. Different people react to weather differently. I get more energy from high and dry, but there are people who get more energy from low and wet, and I know one girl who switched after being pregnant and giving birth. You take a group average and it will come to about zero, but that just masks individual reactions.
Using fixed-effects for each person helps model such heterogeneity, but still nothing comes out. I don’t see why you would dismiss them so readily. It’s just that the old-wives-tales are wrong yet again.
If you really believe that weather relationships could be so obscure and complicated and individual that there are no meaningful average effects, that casts a lot of doubt on the claim that there’s a consistent average effect from CO2 and all the background studies about ventilation and air quality as well.
Using fixed-effects for each person helps model such heterogeneity, but still nothing comes out.
Feddersen et al model very particular heterogeneity, to wit the usual demographic and econometric data:
These include age and its square, the number of household dependents aged between 0 and 24 years, and the natural logarithm of nominal household disposable income for the previous financial year in Australian dollars. Dummy variables are also included for disability status, employment status, marital status and education. These controls are typically the most important determinants of self-reported life
satisfaction
That’s not going to help ferret out idiosyncratic reaction to weather.
It’s just that the old-wives-tales are wrong yet again.
I don’t have any old wives to listen to :-) The source is my personal experience and the experience of people I know who don’t seem to have any reason to lie about it.
If you really believe that weather relationships could be so obscure and complicated and individual that there are no meaningful average effects
I didn’t say that. I said that not seeing average effects does not rule out individual-level effects and that at the anecdotal level I do see these effects.
And there is no reason to generalise to everything. I am sure that “bad air” which is bad enough to produce consistent measurable average effects exists and is not very hard to construct or find.
It won’t be hard if the effects are as large as claimed in the original study. And while we are looking for the total effect, adding more contributions of weather to cognitive performance should make it easier to detect an overall effect (even if each points in a random direction), but that hasn’t been true for weather.
It won’t be hard if the effects are as large as claimed in the original study.
The study shows minor effects at 1000 ppm and pronounced effects at 2500 ppm. I don’t think changes in weather would drive your CO2 concentration to these levels.
And if you interpret the effect of weather as mostly open vs closed windows, there is a whole bunch of other factors in play like the balance of indoor and outdoor contaminants, etc.
I am sceptical of these results, anyway, they look too big. And the authors mention another study:
Researchers in Hungary have questioned this assumption (Kajtar et al. 2003, 2006). The authors reported that controlled human exposures to CO2 between 2,000 ppm and 5,000 ppm, with ventilation rates unchanged, had subtle adverse impacts on proofreading of text in some trials, but the brief reports in conference proceedings provided limited details.
Why do you call the effects at 1000ppm minor? They are easily big enough to measure statistically with a realistic sample size for an observational study, even if the effect of weather on CO2 was only say a 5% change in P(windows open).
Opening my window moves CO2 levels in my room from around 1400 to around 400ppm.
Shoud they? Weather is basically temperature + precipitation + wind + humidity. Off the top of my head I don’t see any reasons why different weather should imply different CO2 concentrations.
Photosynthesis requires light to occur; weather affects the amount of light. Direction of wind determines the amount of upwind plants, and so on. Here’s a link to a week’s worth of data from an outdoor CO2 monitor in Utah; it looks to me like the difference is probably imperceptible, even if one buys the effect sizes for the 600 to 1000 ppm study.
Interesting… I expect the main drivers to be the seasonal cycle (outside of the tropics) and the diurnal cycle.
Here is a nice animation of the seasonal cycle which also demonstrates the asymmetry of the Northern and Southern hemispheres...
I was actually thinking more along the lines of opening windows; you only want your windows open in a fairly narrow band of temperatures, and things like precipitation would also encourage people to seal their houses or apartments or offices up and presumably increase carbon dioxide levels. But yeah, there are probably direct effects from light levels and barometric pressure and other things.
Weather clearly affects people in a lot of ways, do disentangling the CO2 effects will be hard.
Any idea how high will CO2 go in a room in a normal building, say during winter in a well-sealed residential house? Offices and apartments buildings typically have HVAC systems which have standards for air exchange and such, but a single-family house can do whatever it wants to, including turning itself into an airtight box in the name of energy efficiency...
Weather affects people, but as I said, the effects generally seem to be small and not as large as the experiment claims. If there were large weather effects, they could be due to CO2 or other aspects of weather; but since there are not, that implies that all aspects of weather including CO2 are not that important. (Modus ponens, modus tollens, etc.)
I don’t know about that. Anecdotally, I know some people who say that how well they think/work/feel is noticeably—to them—affected by weather, mostly a combination of pressure and humidity. Also anecdotally, the older you get, the more sensitive to weather your body becomes.
Myself, I feel more energetic in high-pressure low-humidity weather than in low-pressure high-humidity, but I haven’t tried to quantify it or be rigorous about it.
People think a lot of mistaken things about their personal psychology. But the weather correlations are still small: ‘Does Life Seem Better on a Sunny Day? Examining the Association Between Daily Weather Conditions and Life Satisfaction Judgments’, Lucas & Lawless 2013; ‘Subjective wellbeing: why weather matters’, Feddersen et al 2015. I found the same thing in my data so far. May just be setpoints.
The attempt to find weather correlations universal to all humans seems misguided to me. Different people react to weather differently. I get more energy from high and dry, but there are people who get more energy from low and wet, and I know one girl who switched after being pregnant and giving birth. You take a group average and it will come to about zero, but that just masks individual reactions.
Using fixed-effects for each person helps model such heterogeneity, but still nothing comes out. I don’t see why you would dismiss them so readily. It’s just that the old-wives-tales are wrong yet again.
If you really believe that weather relationships could be so obscure and complicated and individual that there are no meaningful average effects, that casts a lot of doubt on the claim that there’s a consistent average effect from CO2 and all the background studies about ventilation and air quality as well.
Feddersen et al model very particular heterogeneity, to wit the usual demographic and econometric data:
That’s not going to help ferret out idiosyncratic reaction to weather.
I don’t have any old wives to listen to :-) The source is my personal experience and the experience of people I know who don’t seem to have any reason to lie about it.
I didn’t say that. I said that not seeing average effects does not rule out individual-level effects and that at the anecdotal level I do see these effects.
And there is no reason to generalise to everything. I am sure that “bad air” which is bad enough to produce consistent measurable average effects exists and is not very hard to construct or find.
It won’t be hard if the effects are as large as claimed in the original study. And while we are looking for the total effect, adding more contributions of weather to cognitive performance should make it easier to detect an overall effect (even if each points in a random direction), but that hasn’t been true for weather.
The study shows minor effects at 1000 ppm and pronounced effects at 2500 ppm. I don’t think changes in weather would drive your CO2 concentration to these levels.
And if you interpret the effect of weather as mostly open vs closed windows, there is a whole bunch of other factors in play like the balance of indoor and outdoor contaminants, etc.
I am sceptical of these results, anyway, they look too big. And the authors mention another study:
which implied (“subtle”) small effect size.
Why do you call the effects at 1000ppm minor? They are easily big enough to measure statistically with a realistic sample size for an observational study, even if the effect of weather on CO2 was only say a 5% change in P(windows open).
Opening my window moves CO2 levels in my room from around 1400 to around 400ppm.
I agree the results look too big.