Comment by teekert
8 hours ago
We spend most our time indoors with often 800 ppm… if you’re lucky. I’m a bit annoyed that they don’t specify “the limit of the accepted healthy range” in the summary and didn’t find it with a quick glance over the PDF. But surely there are already people doing over 1000 ppm constantly (ie people that have some outdoors phobia and suboptimal ventilation).
I just checked my Awair Element data for today at home - its true; the average is about ~900ppm with high/low peaks around 1600/500.
I live with 3 dogs and was alone the entire day.
For the interested, here is the graph for a year: https://i.imgur.com/mrXI3y1.png
Indeed.
> However, since the advent of widespread industrialisation, atmospheric CO2 levels have exponentially increased (Fig. 1). In just the last ~ 50 years it has risen from < 340 ppm (in 1980), to > 420 ppm in 2025 (Lan et al., 2025). Atmospheric CO2 is currently increasing at more than 2 ppm each year, largely due to humanity’s activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels (Eggleton, 2012).
There's good reason to believe we're on the cusp of a solar energy revolution and, more generally, ready to turn things around. But even in the worst scenarios I can imagine, outdoor air 50 years from now (as posited in the title) would not be as bad as indoor air now.
What that argument misses is that only say 1 in 10 or just 1 in 100 have to be seriously impacted. Currently, these 1 in 100 can open the windows, but what will they do in the future?