> Just carry a CO2 meter around and measure it yourself. Once you're aware of it, the feeling is impossible to miss.
Sounds like a combination of confirmation bias and psychosomatic placebo effect to me. Plus you’re assuming a specific correlation between subjective minor discomfort and cognitive performance.
There's a reason why we already have universal colloquial language to describe a room with too much CO2, "stuffy," "getting some fresh air to clear your head." We all know this stuff intuitively, we've experienced it directly our whole lives.
Edit to reply to ninja edit:
> There's a reason why we already have universal colloquial language to describe a room with too much CO2, "stuffy" "getting some fresh air to clear your head." We all know this stuff intuitively, we've experienced it directly our whole lives.
First off, you're going back to the perception of minor discomfort to defend the claim that CO2 levels that aren't even high enough to cause minor discomfort are high enough to cause "detectable society wide problems". This strikes me as incoherent and evasive. Secondly, you're assuming that the minor discomfort of being in a "stuffy" room is entirely caused by CO2 concentration. (In my personal experience, body and food odors are the main sources of discomfort when I'm in a poorly ventilated space.) And thirdly, you're assuming that this discomfort necessarily causes poor cognitive performance.
If CO2 was actually high enough to be a problem, the first symptoms would be an increase in heart rate and rate of respiration. Kinda the opposite of lethargy.