Whales Keep Carbon out of the Atmosphere (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Whales Keep Carbon out of the Atmosphere (2017)

scientificamerican.com

93 pointsyurisagalov41 comments

Scientists have made progress in terms of pinpointing exactly how much carbon whales keep out of the atmosphere; one study suggests that every year, sperm whales help sequester as much carbon as 694 acres of U.S. forests do. Another found that in Hawaii, the swimming motion of 80 whales can absorb the equivalent carbon of 208 acres of U.S. forests.

The title of this article made me expect more. Unless they mean the 694 acres is the contribution per whale (the article doesn't provide references).

These numbers look weird. If only 80 whales in Hawaii are equivalent to 208 acres, then the entire world population of sperm whales should certainly contribute more than not even 4 times that number. But just 1 sperm whale contributing almost 4 times what 80 whales contribute in Hawaii also looks unlikely.

They are two different mechanisms though, it could be that the swimming motion mechanism has a far smaller effect. Google tells me there are 360,000 sperm whales, that would make the combined effect of the swimming of all sperm whales similar to that of 60 km x 60 km of forest.

Scientists have made progress in terms of pinpointing exactly how much carbon whales keep out of the atmosphere

What a grossly writen sentence. It suggests that scientists are !pinpointing! !exactly! how much. Except that they are not pinpointing and they don't know it exactly at all.

"Determining" would have been a better word, but I understand what the author was trying for.

"Spitballing" seems more accurate

Only swimming motion? Ive read that sperm whale poop is massively important for feeding phytoplancton (sp) which in turn pulls radically more carbon from the air than those numbers.

The article mentions eco-tourism and whale watching. I wonder if the carbon footprint of someone flying to an island, staying there for a week, and taking boat trips out to whale watch actually results in whales being a net negative on the environment. If we let them die out so that tourism stopped it could be a positive for the planet.

(I'm not suggesting we should actually do this though. Whales are pretty amazing.)

They should just offer high-resolution virtual tourism or anything. Is Youtube tourism a thing already?

Tourism or all those non-vital flights are ruining our planet, along with the high consumerism, which is surely correlated to someone who go visit foreign countries

Tourism should be much harder. Make your way to your destination by bike, yacht, even if it takes a year to get there.

I hope you mean sailing yacht :)

Once we have UBI we might consider year long "vacations", but before that making vacations much harder is unlikely to be a popular opinion.

It's a spectrum. Sitting in a cafe yesterday, I overheard some people talking casually about flying the entire family up to Rarotonga to see a concert.

A wealthy relative recently flew from the Philippines to Tokyo and then returned again - without leaving the airport - so that she could preserve her super ultra sure miles status.

I myself have occasionally flown LHR to SFO to attend a over or two hour meeting.

We cannot continue living like this.

I agree, but people who do things like you listed would be the least affected by making traveling harder.

That depends how we make it harder. Frequent flier + domestic flight levies, for example, can disproportionately affect the behaviours mentioned

>so that she could preserve her super ultra sure miles

Ok that is crazy and that's the airlines fault for creating such a situation.

UBI is not going to be a net win for the environment, not by a long shot. Get ready for another baby boom, here we come UBI.

That very much depends on how and when children are eligible for it. If you have to pay for it out of your own UBI, not so much.

Not to mention that UBI does nothing for the pain of childbirth.

A lot of people want to give up work to look after a baby but can't afford to because they need the income, so they end up not having children. UBI would mean they could afford to give up work and raise children instead. I actually see that as a positive, but if you're concerned about population growth you might see it as a negative.

But would that mean they have more than the replacement rate of children? In the west we're slightly below that already.

It is unlikely that any actual outcome of climate change is going to be popular.

In terms of making choices, though, it is likely that taking vacations in a place that is close enough not to fly there will be more popular than not having heat in winter, not feeding your kids or abandoning the idea of getting medics.

On the other hand, aren't there also benefits of people experiencing more than their backyard?

That's an interesting question. Does traveling to some place helps you to understand and know it better than spending a few hours on Wikipedia and youtube?

That begs that question “what does it mean to visit a place”? I’ve been to a lot of places for both fun and work. I’ve thought a lot about this. Does it count as a visit if you only go to tourist places and hang out with other tourists? Does it count as a visit if you spend your time just at the house of a local speaking with locals but never seeing the sites?

There are. But downsides are greater as they lead to destruction of very places they visit for their beauty.

What if the benefit is that they vote to protect those places when they wouldn't have before?

That is big IF. I can say opposite: what if they do not care anymore as they already saw the place. It has same validity.

It may technically be true initially but ecotourism is generally needed to preserve it economically and from a game theory perspective essentially.

* If it isn't human inhabited why not take it? * If it is human inhabited why not try to raise their standard of living by development and exploitation of natural resources? If there was some sort of payment for holding unspoiled environments it would have compliance and inspection issues not to mention funding and distribution. * However if it is an asset with tourism then "poaching" harms future income and they have incentive to keep it beautiful and clean for real. It may lead to some "manicuring" like removing pests and making trails but biodiversity would be far more preserved. * Those who are already developed may also have the local ecosystems as an effective "service" or amenity from quality of life. Needless to say that is a "late game" option only.

Environmentalism is always a game of trade offs period.

Alternatively... how large would the whale population need to be to counter the carbon footprint of such tourism?

Zoos are very ineffective from a preservation standpoint, if you only consider them as distributed caches of a small amount of viable genetic material.

But as someone once put it to me, if you think of the zoo as an embassy, all of the animals as ambassadors, and consider the policy impacts that come from having people carry around these positive experiences involving the animals, then the benefit of zoos is much more compelling.

I do some work with plants and diversity. There are some very confused people in my peer group who earnestly believe that changing a few acres of real estate inside of a metropolitan area is going to have a direct effect. Like somehow we could supply the entire city with food or materials on a few acres. In the interests of morale I don't tell them how terrifyingly naive that idea is.

Instead I just point out that what we are doing is more like a zoo. We're getting an idea into a lot of people's heads. They may go try to copy some of our strategies, at home or in another city, and that might eventually develop into a measurable change.

So. Is the Greater Good served by a few thousand extra tons of carbon going into the atmosphere today? Maybe, maybe not.

I do know that we have the rhetoric all kinds of wrong. If your friend is having money problems and his car is breaking down all the time, and his boss is getting agitated about his 'flakiness', do you criticize him for "spending money he doesn't have" to get a reliable car? We've been doing exactly that to politicians for years. "Oh don't fly to Copenhagen to talk about Greenhouse Gases you fuckin' hypocrite"

It's bullshit, and what's more it's scaring people into inaction, which basically classifies it as horizontal aggression. Which is exactly what the opposition wants. Stop attacking each other. If you have something to say, educate, don't shame.

According to the article:

"Whales facilitate carbon absorption in two ways. On the one hand, their movements — especially when diving — tend to push nutrients from the bottom of the ocean to the surface, where they feed the phytoplankton and other marine flora that suck in carbon, as well as fish and other smaller animals."

I wonder if it would be possible to artificially create upwards currents in the ocean to push up nutrients, you could do the job of a million whales. Might be cheaper than planting forests...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

That's very interesting:

"Martin's 1988 quip four months later at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, "Give me a half a tanker of iron and I will give you another ice age", drove a decade of research. "

Oceans are huge and human machines aren't anywhere near close to being as efficient as biological machines. It's an interesting idea, but I think we might see way easier wins by first simply stopping killing whales with everything else we're doing.

In the technical sense, Idon’t agree with your claim that “human [produced] machines aren’t anywhere near close to being as efficient as biological machines”. Perhaps you meant that sometimes the least costly way of performing work for some task involves utilizing a biological process.

On the other, hand I do agree that we should stop killing whales (and perhaps there is now another reason to stop as well).

There are actually people exploring this. I saw a documentary at one point about passive ocean pumps (using wave energy) transporting water from lower layers upwards to increase plankton growth. It seems the company Atmocean is doing things like this and James Lovelock wrote a letter about it to Nature, I'm not sure if this is necessarily related to the docu I saw though.

This is also one of the positive side effect of electricity generation from ocean thermal energy. I've wondered for a long time why we're not investing more in this, as it's one of the few possible large scale generation mechanisms that's actually carbon-negative.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...

It's actually phytoplankton that captures the CO2, so what about other kinds of whales that actually feed on plankton and don't dive as deep as sperm whales?

Read The Once and Future World https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World-Nature-Could/dp/030... to learn how much more whales there used to be and their effect on making the environment more stable and able to sustain life.

It's stunning and, I hope, behavior-changing.

I did two video essays on the book, though I didn't cover the parts on whales

- http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-...

- http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-...

Curious here - with everything going on with ocean acidification, would we really rather sequester carbon dioxide in the oceans, where it will contribute to the destruction of corals, or leave it in the atmosphere?

Much of this research is aimed at understanding present nutrient cycling. Remediation is secondary.

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