Climate change and nutrient pollution are depleting oxygen from oceans: study
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The vast majority of the issue isn't related to rising temps, it would still be there if there were no rising temps. It is the agricultural and industrial runoff in what I suspect are very, very specific parts of the ocean. The title "as temperatures rise" is totally dishonest. It's probably closer to something like "as demand for palm oil increases" (not trying to finger that one crop, but its more accurate than "as temperatures rise").
> "To stop the worrying expansion of oxygen-poor areas, we need to decisively curb greenhouse gas emissions as well as nutrient pollution from agriculture and other sources."
If you want to do something decisive, point out where these oxygen depleted areas are, and do something to stop the runoff. That's the main problem. Tying it in to the much more nebulous "carbon emissions" hurts more than it helps but its like climate writers cannot help themselves.
Imagine if everyone trying to stop the ozone-depletion problem did this. Nothing would have gotten done to this day. Find the smallest unit of actionable, measurable change and try to change that first.
EDIT hokay lets read the study:
BBC: "Around 700 ocean sites are now suffering from low oxygen, compared with 45 in the 1960s."
Section 2.5 summary on page 109 (PDF) or page 85 of the report, two bullets:
• Over 900 areas around the world have been identified as experiencing the effects of eutrophication. Of these, over 700 have problems with hypoxia, but through nutrient and organic loading management about 70 (10%) of them can now be classified as recovering.
• There is no other environmental variable of such ecological importance to coastal ecosystems that has changed so drastically in such a short period of time as a result of human activities as dissolved oxygen.
Look, the part BBC wants to spook you with? It's eutrophication! It is independent of warming and can be fixed independent of warming. This is a good thing! It is already being fixed in some areas, which is even nicer. All I ask is that we actually decouple these from "warming" so we can do something about them faster.
This is how we ended up in the situations of enormous ignorance in the climate change and immunization realms, as if scientific rigour, consensus, statistical and foundational fact, etc, are all contentious the moment some random blowhard gives their opinion.
I don't see why a random internet commentator's pet theory (with nothing in the article to support it) should be treated as necessarily better.
They didn't. They blanket dismissed it, gave their own theory, and expressed how tired they are from this cross they must bear.
https://www.unitgraphics.com/deox/IUCNDeoxreportBOOK15-11-20... (77MB)
There's the actual study. The BBC article is pretty accurate in its summary.
That random comment by a random guy on the internet is adding clarity.
This claim has been made multiple times, and the single example has been a misunderstanding of the English language (e.g. "running out").
"That random comment by a random guy on the internet is adding clarity."
That random comment that inserted non-fact, dismissed essentially the entire report...yeah, no, it added just noise. Oh look now the root comment instead of just blanket dismissing global warming entirely has now listed a small sub-summary dealing just with run-off. This is a classic denialist tactic, just moving the fence posts enough, pretending to actually be considering the science.
The journalist is at the same time lying about a problem where there isn't any and hiding a huge problem that can be solved if people focus on it.
[1] as documented by NeedBigTea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21736510
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...
It's partially our governments fault for doing things like when the Atomic Energy Commission got caught being fraudulent about what killed 5000 sheep after the 1953 Upshot-Knothole nuclear weapons test series. When the top scientific institutions lose credibility, where we are today seems at least a little inevitable.
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/09/magazine/downwind-from-th...
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/
Baseless, uninformed skepticism is bad.
[0] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_...
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ja01861a033
EDIT: I didn't see any replies before commenting, so "eventual consistency" of independent commenters likely led to what looks like piling-on. Sorry, that's not the intention.
I'm not sure why you think we should take your non-expert, evidenceless hot take on a BBC article more seriously than an actual study, but if you'd like to dig in more, here it is: https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/48892
From the executive summary at the beginning:
The loss of oxygen in the ocean can broadly be put down to two overlying causes – eutrophication as a result of nutrient run-off from land and deposition of nitrogen from the burning of fossil fuels, and the heating of ocean waters as a result of climate change, primarily causing a change in ventilation with the overlying atmosphere so that they hold less soluble oxygen, and compounded by reduced ocean mixing and changes in currents and wind patterns. Ocean deoxygenation is but the latest consequence of our activities on the ocean to be recognized. Ocean warming, ocean deoxygenation, and ocean acidification are major ‘stressors’ on marine systems and typically co-occur because they share a common cause.
Then from Section 2.1, Global Evidence of ocean deoxygenation:
+ Open-ocean deoxygenation is resulting mainly from a warming ocean, increased stratification and changing circulation which interact with eutrophication-induced hypoxia (oxygen concentration below ~60 to 120 µmol O2 kg-1) and biological activity in shelf regions.
+ Oxygen loss is closely related to ocean warming and acidification caused by CO2 increase driven by CO2 emissions as well as biogeochemical consequences related to anthropogenic fertilization of the ocean; hence a combined effort investigating the different stressors will be most beneficial to understand future ocean changes.
I'm responding to something presented in the BBC article, something they mention context-free, because they want to(?) imply that the problem is related to open ocean temp changes, when... it's not. It's a problem of eutrophication.
It's still a man-made problem, maybe its exacerbated by additional forces, but its dishonest to paint it as if warming has caused these 700 dead zones. Warming did not. Eutrophication did. Most people who read this:
> While nutrient run-off has been known for decades, researchers say that climate change is making the lack of oxygen worse.
> Around 700 ocean sites are now suffering from low oxygen, compared with 45 in the 1960s.
Will think that climate change caused the 700 ocean sites, up from 45, and not run-off. It's how they are couching it. It is bad and we should scrutinize that.
To take the part you criticise, the preceding sentence is "While nutrient run-off has been known for decades, researchers say that climate crisis is making the lack of oxygen worse.", and the following sentence "The threat to oceans from nutrient run-off of chemicals such as nitrogen and phosphorus from farms and industry has long been known to impact the levels of oxygen in the sea waters and still remains the primary factor, especially closer to coasts."
Are they painting that as warming? Not by my reading. Does every single sentence have to correlate to the title when most do? Hm. No.
Then the article goes out into the wider oceans and talks of deoxygenation there, and the lack of mixing. Suitably dumbed down for their target audience. Could they have spelt it out better whilst meeting the needs of their non-scientific audience? Probably - it's sloppily worded, which can be said about just about every science article in every mainstream publication.
But the core point remains - the report, and the article point to a joint cause, and from my fast skim of summary sections of a 500+ page PDF a majority of the problem stems from heating.
"While X has been a known issue, we now know about Y making things worse"
"What was [a little bad] in the 1960's is now [really super bad]"
The implicit finger is pointed at Y, I think. I sincerely think that's the takeaway most audiences would get from a setup like this.
Maybe I'm being too hard on the article. But the really damning thing (700 dead zones) seems way too context-free for me.
Sure it's sloppily written, but so is nearly every article on astronomy or medicine etc. But I'd generally like more science in my science reporting than I'm ever going to get.
And as it's a longer one, I wonder how much time they get to boil down a 500 page report to 1 page pop-science piece.
Much of the [oxygen] loss is expected in the top 1,000m of the water column, which is richest in biodiversity.
You are focusing on eutrophication of shallow waters near land, but that isn’t the problem.
Instead of complaining about sensationalism or nonsense, why don't you skip instead to discussing the actual study at hand and suggest some actual actions we could do to solve the problem? Since you're apparently more of an expert than the journalist here.
I don't know where the brigade was drawn from, but this is simply incredible anti-intellectualism writ large. Seeing the pandering of this sort of behavior on HN is deeply disturbing. Seeing this guy's classic denialist post literally as the top moderated post on HN -- wow, I wouldn't trust this aggregate crowd on any topic.
It is one of those eye-opening moments that makes me seriously ask what I'm doing here. When we have to treat all "opinions" as if they carry weight, we are doomed.
Climate change is a long-term issue we absolutely should deal with, but the consequences of not doing as much as ideal are, while large, still normalish-distribution-bad, not apocalypse-bad. Too much of the messaging around climate change to date has been apocalyptic. Realistically, anyone who wants to create a bubble of actually constructive discussion and action in this area in a public forum in 2019 should ban all apocalyptic terms/discussion on sight, to avoid triggering a huge number of people who are offended by bogus apocalyptic claims.
Banning that sort of discussion just means nations like Vanuatu get to continually be silenced.
Hint: Most of Singapore is at an elevation of <15m; they’re roughly as exposed as Vanuatu. They also have a government with one of the best technocratic track records in the world. And they’re keeping an eye on climate change, but they aren’t panicking.
So here we are.
The small scale work done so far shows the water gets cleaner and local fish population increases. Kelp grows incredibly quickly and it can be eaten by humans and animals or used as fertilizer. The farming can be done by experienced watermen who probably have suitable boats but are underemployed due to fishing restrictions.
https://ideas.ted.com/vertical-ocean-farms-that-can-feed-us-...
https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documen...
In particular, I wanted to see what new contributions this report was making in measurement of ocean oxygen concentrations. Section 2.1 appears to be the place this is covered, but all I see is a review of previous work by others.
The report is extraordinarily vague about what exactly were the experiments the authors did (if any). It's not structured like a research paper and reads instead like a very long executive summary. I expected to find a detailed analysis of how O2 measurements were conducted, and the possible limitations of the techniques, but there was none.
Not only are we facing the end of civilisation as we know it, it’s going to be a long ass grind to the end constantly discussing the climate crises in between dodging one catastrophe after the next and obsessing over it all.
I hardly remember life without talking about it, but I do remember it was nicer and more simple.
Will deniers get sick of denying soon so we can move on ?
But what is "more" and how much is enough so the complainers stop complaining?
No rational being is denying climate change -- governments are not promoting pollution or whatever. We can face the end of civilization in more ways than just climate change. There are many other issues that are currently equally, if not more, important than climate change.
The perpetual complainers should get sick of complaining so we can move on.
I would agree, yet we have many of those people in our government. The US president and vice president are both climate change deniers.
> governments are not promoting pollution or whatever
The current US administration has rolled back many clean water acts and signed away protected land to mine for resources.
> There are many other issues that are currently equally, if not more, important than climate change.
Please, do tell, because I don't see it.
Stop wishing. Go do something about it.
Current things I do / have done are:
- Attend rallies occasionally.
- Divested most of my money where applicable.
- Invest in energy companies and tech.
- I went vegetarian for 2 years. I do eat meat again now, but not a great deal and mostly fish and chicken when I do.
- Have not owned a car for about 2 years, I cycle and use public transport.
- Fly less than once a year currently. I live abroad so sometimes I do need to go home to visit family.
- Buy essential things like clothes from companies who do things sustainably such as Patagonia. Don't really buy junk.
- Buy a monthly subscription to Climeworks.
As an individual I can do my bit; But clearly there is a limited amount of things I can do. I can't force countries to stop burning coal for power generation for example, which let's be honest, is the real crux of the issue. When I catch public transport, it's usually backed by coal or diesel right now.
What I don't get is this coal love affair that politicians can't seem to get over. We have so much to lose from climate change, including economically, so why do people love it so? It seems to be somewhat of an addiction. There seems to be a kind of "strength in denying" that older people enjoy to see in politicians. I don't really understand it but if this attitude changes, can be changed we'd instantly start on the correct path.
I also don't understand why simple and more cheap counter measures aren't being implemented rapidly.For example, afforestation. Is this because it's an admission something is wrong so most Governments won't do that so there is no commitment in it?
What is the actual the blocker here really? Corruption? Ignorance? Lobbying? We need to identify it and address it very quickly if we all want to survive and have a decent quality of life. This is why I have compassion for deniers, they don't really understand or want to admit how bad their lives will be.
On a personal level, I'm between jobs now looking for new things. I'm optimistic about the transition to renewables happening. The renewable tech is moving so fast and becoming so cheap I can see more and more of the grid changing quickly, at least in the developed world (which isn't enough on it's own); However I'm a little surprised at how little is being done to remove existing Co2. This also needs to happen.
I'm really considering how I can change my career to work on direct air capture tech or renewables even though this is far from my where my expertise lie as I'm in software.
If it helps, you are not alone. I felt helpless and frustrated for a long time myself. One thing that gives me hope at the moment is Extinction Rebellion. I realise it's not for everyone but I believe they are the best chance we have right now.
I greatly appreciate the science and am glad for progress in our efforts. But I think we are not competent to solve planet-wide issues when we have largely rejected the instructions given by the earth's Creator (like, honesty, the Golden Rule, etc, etc): we have a hard time trusting each other even when we say we agree. I'm glad we can share our own thoughts. We need His help both to address important issues globally, and in our personal lives.
And importantly, we can be OK. Related, more detailed thoughts at http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854581820.html , a simple site w/ no javascript or sales).
If we can have companies following constructs such as Sarbanes-Oxley then they can most certainly follow the constraints of environmental constructs.
Unless you mean that certain vested interests will bankroll politicians to cut regulation? Then yes, that is a very big problems (see: Koch industries buying their way out of environmental legislation) but not insurmountable.
It’s all got to be on the table and considered though. The entire energy footprint of almost all of the industrial revolution through to current needs to be undone in some way. There’s an inherent requirement on the energy that must be expended in order to do that, by the laws of thermodynamics/physics.