Ocean's Oxygen Starts Running Low (2016)
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
I spent quite some time in South-East Asia the past few years, and when you see the sheer amount of boats that just dump all their trash in the ocean, and the sheer lack of awareness of the issue, it makes you hopeless. I come home, diligently recycling my trash, and I can't help but wonder whether this is all just a show, and not addressing any of the core issues that are needed to fix this.
The reason I mentioned that is that I figured there were two outcomes:
- be rich/save money now, and get a possible competitive edge over other countries
- invest in your future, long-term assuming other countries do the same
> I spent quite some time in South-East Asia
> I come home, diligently recycling my trash
Not saying you shouldn't recycle your trash, but your flights are much more impactful for the environment than your trash.
Plastic in the oceans, now that’s a mess.
(I too feel conflicted about plane travel and it's long term impact.)
According to the above article, one would prefer that.
> The trend has continued so that in 2010, flying burned just 2,691 BTU per passenger mile—an improvement of 74 percent since 1970. That was 43 percent better than driving the average car, which gets about 21.5 miles per gallon (4,218 BTU per passenger mile)
By emitting that large amount of co2, you are disrupting the ocean co2 flux, reducing o2 available and causing acidification. The warming caused by the thermal capacity of the co2 melts the polar ice , cooling the oceans and reducing their salinity. Plastic is relatively a small problem.
Air travel research has shown biofuels are production ready, but it’s not cost competitive yet, although that’s a market failure through the externalization of emission costs.
The book also remarks upon how a (theoretical) revival of ocean liners would actually be worse.
Having said that, I agree with aircraft pollution. And this indeed implies that I recycling is silly compared to other things I do. So this only fuels the apathy I'm starting to feel towards this whole thing.
Do you know that the garbage that is "recycled" in the USA used to be sent (until Dec 2017) directly to China? This is one of the scams of the century. Nobody knows what China does with the material they cannot use, and in fact they just decided not to take it anymore.
Recycling isnt much help. Putting a few meters of solar on your roof is far more important. Not taking a first-class flight to vacation on the other side of the planet is also good. Installing an entire roof of solar, and making sure your grandparents vote against the coal lobby, that's the best anyone can do atm.
That´s exactly what is going on.
It's a garden variety coordination problem - but it seems that, with technology successfully solving most of our non-social problems, lack of coordination is what underlies all the important issues humanity faces these days.
See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ for an in-depth discussion of coordination problems.
We are never going to fix this.
Never is a long time.
It's just going to take way longer to switch over, since those things are way larger parts of everyone's life and economics than hairspray was.
ozone layer: stop emitting CFCs, they'll decompose over decades and ozone concentrations will rise again
climate change: just stop emitting carbon and...
no wait, we're still locked into centuries of rising ocean levels and temperatures even if we lowered everything to zero right now.
It would take actively extracting CO2 from the atmosphere at very very large scale to reverse the effects.
We need more renewables faster :/
That's not a good comparison - ozone layer and acid rain were caused by very specific externalities that were relatively easily substituted with "better" ones that didn't cause (for instance) ozone holes and acid rain.
Carbon, on the other hand, is the least common denominator of human activity - so much so that even our breath produces it. I don't see any possible patterns of human existence on the earth that are ex-carbon.
Carbon output is a simple function of population in a way that ozone and sulfur are not.
The long arch of hope seems pretty hopeless from an individual's perspective at this moment in time, so much so that I actively try (and fail) _not_ to think about this. I can't imagine what folks at, say, the pentagon, are planning out who spend all day obsessing on it. They must have some pretty dark scenarios mapped out.
Simply put, we have grown to the size of our resource container and that container is about to shrink. We're far from ready. The species will likely eek it's way through. Civilization? Not so much.
As a community, HN seems to think nuclear energy is easy while carpooling or flying less are misguided wastes of effort.
Yes, because it's the truth. Knowing that reflects understanding.
It's orders of magnitude easier to design[0] a nuclear reactor than it is to get a meaningful number of people to voluntarily refrain from flying, or even driving cars. Getting lots of people to agree on something, especially when they have strong short-term incentives for not following through on that agreement, is a near-impossible thing.
Pretty much the only way to tackle coordination problems (without going full-authoritarian, one dictator to rule the world) is to develop technologies and strategies that reduce the "activation energy" required for people to coordinate on an issue.
We won't get ourselves out of this mess by appeals to our shared human heritage, because responsibility for the planet always takes a backseat when one's tired and has to choose between 20 minutes in a car or 1 hour in a bus to pick up their daughter from school.
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[0] - and build it; but notice where pretty much all the problems with building a nuclear plant are - getting the local population to agree to it.
Sometimes I wonder, who are those people who don't give a damn and just dump garbage wherever they please. I personally don't know any of them (or at least I don't know I know). But then I realize that current population levels mean we all live in our own filter bubbles. I did a back-of-the-napkin math recently and realized that personally, I've meaningfully interacted with at most 0.1% of people in the city I live in. In other words, I don't know a first thing about 99.9% of people I live next to. This probably explains why everyone seems so surprised come election days, or when they start discussing anything on a mainstream Internet portal.
All of this suggests civilization is a fragile thing, and the only structure and semblance of stability it has is thanks to systemic incentives (I wonder how our streets would look like if you couldn't be fined for littering). There's too many of us, we don't know one another, and we can't agree on shit, unless indirectly compelled by self-interest. I think the only way to achieve some large-scale coordination is to work on the incentives and the environment in which they apply, but that itself is a hard thing - especially that for any change you'd like to make, there will be those who profit off status quo and want to oppose you.
Really, designing a new nuclear reactor is trivial in comparison.
Not that this makes it easy...
There are many bad things the Trump administration might be remembered for domestically but internationally the most visible decision was the withdrawal from the climate change accords and it may eventually make the USA a pariah state no matter what military might they have.
Wouldn't there also be more different fish now especially in places that used to be covered by ice? Sure, some species might die off but you might get more new species as well. Some new fish perhaps that is good at living in lower oxygen concentration. Also, the fish that lived in the tropics can move to subtropics and so on.
I see it as more of a change that's not really bad or good. As Joe Carlin once said, the Earth will be fine.
Here is the clip: https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4
The changes you're talking about are happening over decades.
These changes will not be limited to just the oceans.
And the main takeaway point from that George Carlin clip that I can find is that the planet will be fine because people won't be. I can only assume you didn't bother to watch it before posting it for others to watch.
This is in comparison to fish, in which adaptations take a longer time, where the decrease in oxygen is a direct threat to life.
Earth will be fine, but we, you, me all the other humans, need earth to be healthy so that we can continue to exist, as apex predators we are extremely dependent on the lower branches of the foodchain working properly and all our hydroponics tech won't save us if we don't have oxygen in the air to live off.
Keep in mind that the atmospheric oxygen is there to a very large extent because the oceans act as the planet's lungs.
Lower oxygen in the oceans means less life in the oceans and ultimately less oxygen in the atmosphere, which affects all life on earth, including us. So unless you feel a planet with mostly just plant and insect life is 'fine' you probably need to review that piece a couple of times to get the real impact of it, in which Carlin's prediction is that we won't make it.
Would you mind elaborating on this? It's not clear to me how we would be less dependent on lower branches of the food chain if we weren't apex predators.
You're just repeating the claim, and again, I do not follow the logic. Again, my question is: why would it be less disastrous if we were lower in the food chain? It would help to give an example of a species at a lower position in our food web and explain why, if we took its position, we'd be better off.
> as apex predators we are extremely dependent on the lower branches of the foodchain working properly
Again, I repeat my question: if we were lower in the food web, wouldn't we still depend on branches of the food web lower than you? That seems to be true regardless of where you are on the food web. In fact, wouldn't we be more susceptible to harm if we had fewer possible sources of food? One would expect that the fewer alternatives we have, the worse off we would be, right?
I think a lot of current hysteria it is driven by petroleum politics and geopolitics. Otherwise, both parties in US government would have been pro-environmentalism. Try to think of why someone might have a different position given that they understand the science.
Finally, regarding humans surviving. What is the ultimate number of humans that should exist on earth? How much environmental damage or "change" is allowed to sustain these humans or for "progress" to occur? How many children should humans be allowed to have? Who gets to decide these things? Should humans be allowed to develop new industries at the expense of the environment?
Some people think that it's best to live in tribes and forego all technology. Some are content living with current tech advancement and keeping population at about what it is now. Others think humans should spread to as many planets as possible.
If we go, all vertebrates go too. At least all cat and bigger sized.
Life will survive, but I would not call if "fine". Is it still fine if it's only microscopic life? When it stops being fine?
I think unless we start blowing up Earth with nuclear weapons on purpose, it will be fine.
If humans are gone today, the CO2 levels will go back to normal pretty quickly with plenty of animals surviving all over the place.
But dinosaurs clearly are not.
> I think unless we start blowing up Earth with nuclear weapons on purpose, it will be fine.
What you think is not so important. What the worlds scientists specialising in that field think is important. If you feel that short of nuclear global destruction our impact is negligible then that contradicts just about all peer reviewed research.
> If humans are gone today, the CO2 levels will go back to normal pretty quickly with plenty of animals surviving all over the place.
That does not align with my understanding of the word 'fine', but seems to imply a rather apocalyptic ending for the human race, something that we might do better to avoid.
What we care about is us, humans. When we say "save the planet", what we mean is "save the ecosystem that's letting us live here, and enjoy that life". If we break things and die as a result, sure, something else will live. But we don't care about that something else, we care about us.
It's a stupid shorthand, but for some reason people appreciate the fake humility of saying it's about Earth, not about us.
I'm so tired of hearing this empty phrase being used. Sure it was fun as a punchline but move along already. It's such a derailment of the discussion. It doesn't state what we mean by "earth" - is it the rock, the ecosystem, life itself? And it implies that the "earth" that is fine is the one that we actually should care about. I have no idea, because the way it's used is not really falsifiable and it's not really anything but a rhetorical trick.
Regardless, when I say Earth, I mean the rock and likely ecosystems that currently exist and might develop on it. I think these things cannot be easily separated that's why Earth is used.
Well if that's part of "Earth" then "Earth will be fine" is a lie.
"Meh, dinosaurs have come and gone. The Earth will be fine."
"...To combat this, we need budget. Starting this year, your tax will increase by five percent."
"Murder! Fire! Revolution! How dare you!"
...happens all the time.
No worries. ;P
You're funnier than Carlin. Congratulations.
Your totally unnecessary commentary added nothing.