Whales could help curb climate change | Hacker News Reader

Whales could help curb climate change

weforum.org

53 pointsbased220 comments

Oh my. The cold numbers aren't good: whales just don't currently represent enough biomass to make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of Gigatonnes and Teratonnes of CO2.

If a rational team wanted to lock away as much carbon as possible using biological processes (BeCCS), going far up the food-chain doesn't seem like the most efficient way to do it.

Here a couple of the kind of options that seem to make more sense:

0. When conditions are right, ferrous ocean seeding at scale to stimulate phytoplankton blooms because relatively little iron is required to have a massive effect. [a] It might make sense to have a floating system of self-replicating drone factories that can send out floating fertilizer drones went conditions are good.. easier said than done.

1. Fertilizing and planting kelp wherever it seems to grow best. There is currently a massive kelp forest in the Atlantic and Caribbean between the Yucatan and Africa that is causing all sorts of havoc with tourist beaches. That kelp should be expanded, harvested, concentrated and sequestered on an enormous scale, either at the bottom of deep ocean trenches (cheaper) or below ground ($$ but more permanent).

Drastic actions that are efficient at scale must be tried. Even if it costs upwards of $50 trillion because survival is worth any treasure since there are no U-hauls behind hearses. What doesn't help is fixation over any comparatively-insignificant biomass like whales or planting a biomass-insignificant number of trees; virtue signaling is a cognitive-dissonant participation award, not solutions that move the needle enough to avoid a climate catastrophe.

References:

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

Isn't plankton seeding potentially dangerous? I mean, the Mississippi River has been "seeding" the Gulf of Mexico to the point that it has a persistent dead zone from oxygen depletion- algae and what not grow, die and sink, and the decay results in less than 2 ppm oxygen in the deep waters.

Can we actually meaningfully sequester enough carbon this way without drastically altering the subsurface ecosystems of an ocean?

Edit: to be clear, I am not trying to be contrarian, just genuinely curious if it would be any different.

It says when they die, they sink to the bottom, "locking the carbon" at the bottom of the ocean.

But isn't a significant part of that carbon released into the water as they're eaten and otherwise decomposed and dissolved?

Whale corpses tend to reach the bottom of the ocean largely intact actually! It's hard for most creatures to eat them quickly enough, and they're typically largely eaten by sharks and scavengers on the ocean floor.

This statement in the article is really dumb: "whales accumulate an average of 33 tonnes of CO2". Yes, but that's from eating other plants & animals that would otherwise accumulate that same CO2 themselves. Furthermore, whales (like all mammals) breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2 so the net effect of breathing and eating alone (ignoring the 'whale pump' phenomena) is an increase in CO2.

Based on stuff I've read in the past, I think it may be a net figure. But you'd need to check the literature to be sure.

Please be more polite. You didn't comment on this part of the article:

> When they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, locking that carbon away for hundreds of years.

""The plankton absorb the carbon dioxide like a tree," Barton says, "and when they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and that carbon is locked away for thousands of years. "

https://psmag.com/environment/global-warming-is-putting-phyt...

We are back to dumb again?

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

"The carbon stored in populations of marine vertebrates is only a small part of the total carbon in marine ecosystems; however, the impact of rebuilding stocks of fish and whales would be comparable to existing carbon sequestration projects."

I find it strange after 40+ years of Save the Whales we are discussing using whales as a carbon sink.

But to me increasing animals that eat plants which are the actual cabon sinks would decrease the ability of the ocean to sequester carbon.

But I'd have to see a mathematical model. Animals hasten death but also reduce reproduction speed.

Edit - whales are carnivores so not applicable

Why do I have to think of Star Trek IV?

In any case, one more reason to make sure that those great creatures have a future.

From the World Economic Forum at Davos...

"Over a lifespan of around 60 years, whales ... accumulate an average of 33 tonnes of CO2 ... By comparison, a tree absorbs up to 48 pounds of CO2 a year."

The modern version of "apples and oranges" ? "whales and trees"

I'm surprised to see that whales are beneficial to phytoplankton, I would have thought that they primarily eat them.

The article isn't too clear... is their primary use in promoting phytoplankton growth just mixing of water?

It is in the article, albeit short on detail. Their waste is a fertilizer:

As they rise up through the ocean to breathe and migrate across the globe, the iron and nitrogen in their waste provides ideal growing conditions for these microscopic creatures

I believe whales primarily eat krill, which eat phytoplankton. Phytoplankton eat whale poop. In the Netflix documentary Our Planet, the episode The High Seas discusses how the whaling ban in the 80s has led to a resurgence of the humpback whale population and how they help provide nutrients to promote phytoplankton growth.

So, the article could really do a better job here, but it is a known fact that nutrient bottlenecks in phytoplankton reduction can be very efficiently solved when "upwelling" occurring bringing the minerals to the upper layers. I can certainly imagine a similarly efficient process which relies on whale waste to provide these nutrients, this is called a "whale pump" in the article. Would love to see better reference on this!

Admittedly this is low impact, but it is critical to maintain rational optimism in regard to the challenge of climate change. Doomsday-ism doesn't help anything. If you feel the same way, come be productive and join the conversations going on at https://collective.energy

> If we helped whales return to their pre-whaling numbers of 4- to 5 million (up from 1.3 million today), researchers say they could capture 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2 annually - with the cost of protecting them at just $13 per person a year.

The cost per person in the world?

$13 per person year times global population is 13*7.8 = $101 billion a year.

Click bait headline

We've edited it now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com