Oxigen is ALSO, and perhaps in vast quantities produced at the bottom of the ocean, by lumps of metal that react with sea water (aka Dark Oxygen). Interestingly, there are now massive marine harvesting operations targeting that very ore.
Deep-sea mining has been studied and foreseen for at least 50 years, but it's never been economical. It is possible that current technology will allow for mining of nodules, but this still seems unlikely to me.
Now look up the temperatures within the water column. I don't see any notes about pressure. Temperature is one axis ...
Your charts show several "green house gases" and with some squinting and handwaving could be used to "prove" that the seas are mopping up those gases and saving the planet.
I used to keep tropical fish and they somehow managed to survive in water temperatures way higher than the open seas. In an aquarium it is the surface water area (not volume) that generally decides how many fish can live within it. The surface area determines how much oxygen can be absorbed, Oxygenating plants help and agitating the surface increases the surface area - it does not "mix in" oxygen.
The note on pressure is near the top of the page. "at one atmosphere (101.325 kPa) ". How would we even move the pressure axis for the ocean? I have no idea what you're complaining about.
The cost of not addressing it is more distributed: at some point you can't go outside anymore since the UV index is so high, sunscreen can't block high-intensity UV-B and UV-C, plants get damaged to the point of catastrophic crop failures... you can live in denial about climate change in developed countries (for a limited time anyway) but ozone affects everyone.
True but at the time the ozone hole was mostly over the Antarctic so the average person didn't feel its effects which wouldn't then contribute to the change in policy.
the kind of changes that were required to avoid massive famines also rely on chemical fertilizer. aaand.... "the production of chemical fertilizers, particularly synthetic nitrogen-based ones, is a highly energy-intensive process that creates significant amounts of carbon dioxide"
If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse
When the costs are low and require no change in personal behaviour, nor even belief in the problem. Billions of people had no idea about changes to aerosol propellants or refrigerants and they were not required to know or agree in order to solve the problem.
Do people have to know about what generates their electricity? They get input now, but we could probably just stop taking public input on new infrastructure and that would avoid poorly motivated protests of wind farms or nuclear.
They do not need to know what generates there electricity but...
- when what generates the power changes the landscape they can see, many people get upset, however irrationally
- many people are emotionally attached to lifestyle objects that use fossil fuels, i.e. cars, boats, planes, etc
- even where there are good options, most people are not willing to spend one extra penny
- even when there are options that cost less (i.e. bicycles, walking) humans spend a lot of their energy thinking about status and struggle to voluntarily choose things that they fear might result in a loss of status
- even if you solve all that, collective action problems are a named thing for a reason - they are hard and don't necessarily have obvious answers.
My point is not that everything is hopeless, but that OP who said "Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale..." has a point that we will have to grapple with if we want to actually change stuff. Wishing human nature away doesn't actually solve anything.
Good point - maybe also stop taking public input on decisions. :V
I kid, but I get more sympathetic to totalitarian countries seeing how people react to some things too. it simplifies "banding together" if there's fewer decision makers I guess and I can't think of a good way to have that squared with democracy.
We almost eradicated several diseases, usually screwed over by designating an Omelasan child (though, that's a bad characterization, because letting parts of the world continue to suffer and serve as a reservoir for those diseases was actually completely unnecessary).
I think that the banng of HFCs is a pretty good example of collective action.
Also, it's important to realize that climate change, as we best understand it right now, is not a "or perish" type of situation. RCP8.5 has now been soundly eliminated from the set of potential climate trajectories, so what we're left with is a question of 1) how much mass migration will be forced upon the world, with concomitant wars and social strife, and 2) how much economic loss results from that, as well as from lost opportunity by not adopting cheaper renewable energy routes.
Technological innovation has done something absolutely remarkable: the future with the cheapest and most abundant energy is the one that switches to renewable energy and storage the fastest. Every day we delay, not only do we end up with a worse climate outcome, but we also just light money on fire, with worse economic efficiency. And in economies built on the continual compounding interest of technological advancement, we subject humanity to far greater poverty for every day we delay the transition.
Most of the world will benefit from this technological change happening quickly. There will be some outliers, like the US, that choose to be poorer and less influential by actively subverting renewable energy in the marketplace (the Trump administration has done a huge amount of economic damage in only a small amount of time), but the US will come around. Texas is leading the way, because they are actually market driven more than they are politically driven, but the rest of the US is kind of screwed on that front for a while.
I'm not understanding how this observation relates to my comment, in any way.
Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. The areas that are just developing widespread electricity now will do it far cleaner than the US did, skipping the lower development stages of electricity and jumping directly into the future, if that's what you're saying. But I'm having trouble understanding what you mean.
True, but most people don't think about why that is the case. They'll blame slavery (abolished over 160 years ago), or the "exploitation" by capitalists (that produce wealth for all). Some may claim that the US has more natural resources, but The US is rich because of the freedoms and rights that our citizens have. Look at the poverty of the Soviet Union or Mao's China, or in Cuba today.
I cannot for the life of me understand the increasing popularity of socialism and communism in the US today. Those forms of government have a proven track record of failure.
Let's consider the economies of Communist nations. I suggest we take into account a bit of regional history.
By any measure, China has come a long way since the Communist regime took over in 1949.
You could say something similar about Soviet Russia. By the 1980s it had stagnated, but the average Russian was incomparably better off than in 1917.
How far have Russians come since then? Has capitalism ushered in a golden age of prosperity and well-being? (Here's a clue: life expectancy peaked in 1986.)
Vietnam has done reasonably well since other countries stopped invading it.
American foreign policy hasn't done much for Cubans, either. Especially in the last few months.
Historically speaking over over a billion years almost every species has consumed one thing and output another to the point of extinction while another species that consumes that grows and repeats the cycle.
Climate change has been the story of evolution since life appeared on earth and aglae filled the atmosphere with gasses.
"We"?
if by "we" you mean Chinese, then yes, as THEY have maintained a cultural structure and language far longer than we have, and adapting themselves and there environment to do that was something they have been doing successfully for millenia,China still venerates the first engineer "Gun"assigned to control the flooding on the yallu river 3300 years ago, and it is then no surprise that they are building solar, wind and other renewable fossil/carbon free energy sources at an unprecidented rate, and ultra high voltage grid systems to distribute that energy, while we wring our hands committing genocide on the Palistinians.
Oxygen loss already happens, see news about dead fish.
Issue here is that becomes more common and underwater oxygen loss is approaching an “unsafe space” with impacts likely irreversible within human lifetimes, some of which could persist for centuries.
The feedback loop between warming and deoxygenation is particularly concerning for deep-water systems that have been stable for millennia. If we hit the thresholds mentioned where the ocean's 'internal clock' is disrupted, it might permanently alter nutrient cycling beyond what current atmospheric models predict. I'm curious if any researchers here have insight into whether localized aeration tech could mitigate this in crucial spawning grounds, or if the scale is simply too vast.
Next post would be what: Human hubris as measured by UN Hubris Measuring Commitee now threatens to collapse the entire solar system into a purple hole?
Can we please snap out of it and use something like if not common sense but at least a Fermi approach? Or did he die in vain?
Oxigen is ALSO, and perhaps in vast quantities produced at the bottom of the ocean, by lumps of metal that react with sea water (aka Dark Oxygen). Interestingly, there are now massive marine harvesting operations targeting that very ore.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-discove...
Deep-sea mining has been studied and foreseen for at least 50 years, but it's never been economical. It is possible that current technology will allow for mining of nodules, but this still seems unlikely to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining#History
it wont matter how much oxygen you try to dissolve, if the temperature is too high you wont hold enough dissolved oxygen to allow aquatic life.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/gases-solubility-water-d_...
Now look up the temperatures within the water column. I don't see any notes about pressure. Temperature is one axis ...
Your charts show several "green house gases" and with some squinting and handwaving could be used to "prove" that the seas are mopping up those gases and saving the planet.
I used to keep tropical fish and they somehow managed to survive in water temperatures way higher than the open seas. In an aquarium it is the surface water area (not volume) that generally decides how many fish can live within it. The surface area determines how much oxygen can be absorbed, Oxygenating plants help and agitating the surface increases the surface area - it does not "mix in" oxygen.
My point is: That's all bollocks.
The note on pressure is near the top of the page. "at one atmosphere (101.325 kPa) ". How would we even move the pressure axis for the ocean? I have no idea what you're complaining about.
Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale needed to address something like climate change and underwater oxygen loss?
What would be the closest “we’ve got to change or perish” moment we’ve successfully navigated?
We did a reasonable job with ozone depletion, but that has much lower costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
Yesterday there was an article here about ozone vs aluminum from the spacex sattelites reentry (which soon there will be plenty of)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062120
“Plasma Tunnels Reveal How Dying Satellites Fall to Earth” (ieee.org)
The cost of not addressing it is more distributed: at some point you can't go outside anymore since the UV index is so high, sunscreen can't block high-intensity UV-B and UV-C, plants get damaged to the point of catastrophic crop failures... you can live in denial about climate change in developed countries (for a limited time anyway) but ozone affects everyone.
True but at the time the ozone hole was mostly over the Antarctic so the average person didn't feel its effects which wouldn't then contribute to the change in policy.
Acid rain as well.
The only truly global intervention I can think of whose impact might be discernible over geological timescales is the ban on testing nuclear weapons.
Lead in gasoline? https://ourworldindata.org/leaded-gasoline-phase-out
Food?
I.E. avoiding population collapse due to lack of ecosystem carrying capacity? Eliminating famine? etc.
the kind of changes that were required to avoid massive famines also rely on chemical fertilizer. aaand.... "the production of chemical fertilizers, particularly synthetic nitrogen-based ones, is a highly energy-intensive process that creates significant amounts of carbon dioxide"
Nuclear weapons (so far)?
Banning CFCs perhaps?
If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse
Ozone hole over Antarctica.
It is possible for us to work together and fix these things.
Edit:
Moving away from leaded gas might be another example.
(CFCs and leaded gas invented by the same dude, fun fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. Quite a legacy...)
When the costs are low and require no change in personal behaviour, nor even belief in the problem. Billions of people had no idea about changes to aerosol propellants or refrigerants and they were not required to know or agree in order to solve the problem.
Do people have to know about what generates their electricity? They get input now, but we could probably just stop taking public input on new infrastructure and that would avoid poorly motivated protests of wind farms or nuclear.
They do not need to know what generates there electricity but...
- when what generates the power changes the landscape they can see, many people get upset, however irrationally
- many people are emotionally attached to lifestyle objects that use fossil fuels, i.e. cars, boats, planes, etc
- even where there are good options, most people are not willing to spend one extra penny
- even when there are options that cost less (i.e. bicycles, walking) humans spend a lot of their energy thinking about status and struggle to voluntarily choose things that they fear might result in a loss of status
- even if you solve all that, collective action problems are a named thing for a reason - they are hard and don't necessarily have obvious answers.
My point is not that everything is hopeless, but that OP who said "Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale..." has a point that we will have to grapple with if we want to actually change stuff. Wishing human nature away doesn't actually solve anything.
Stop taking public input on public infrastructure. That would go over life a lead balloon.
Good point - maybe also stop taking public input on decisions. :V
I kid, but I get more sympathetic to totalitarian countries seeing how people react to some things too. it simplifies "banding together" if there's fewer decision makers I guess and I can't think of a good way to have that squared with democracy.
We haven't fixed the ozone hole yet. It'll take another 40 years for it to return to the levels prior to 1980:
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/ozone-hole-...
Well, we inadvertently stopped having as much children. That should help, but our current system economic systems can’t handle falling birthrates
We almost eradicated several diseases, usually screwed over by designating an Omelasan child (though, that's a bad characterization, because letting parts of the world continue to suffer and serve as a reservoir for those diseases was actually completely unnecessary).
I think that the banng of HFCs is a pretty good example of collective action.
Also, it's important to realize that climate change, as we best understand it right now, is not a "or perish" type of situation. RCP8.5 has now been soundly eliminated from the set of potential climate trajectories, so what we're left with is a question of 1) how much mass migration will be forced upon the world, with concomitant wars and social strife, and 2) how much economic loss results from that, as well as from lost opportunity by not adopting cheaper renewable energy routes.
Technological innovation has done something absolutely remarkable: the future with the cheapest and most abundant energy is the one that switches to renewable energy and storage the fastest. Every day we delay, not only do we end up with a worse climate outcome, but we also just light money on fire, with worse economic efficiency. And in economies built on the continual compounding interest of technological advancement, we subject humanity to far greater poverty for every day we delay the transition.
Most of the world will benefit from this technological change happening quickly. There will be some outliers, like the US, that choose to be poorer and less influential by actively subverting renewable energy in the marketplace (the Trump administration has done a huge amount of economic damage in only a small amount of time), but the US will come around. Texas is leading the way, because they are actually market driven more than they are politically driven, but the rest of the US is kind of screwed on that front for a while.
No matter how poor you think the US is, the average person in the rest of the world is indeed poorer.
I'm not understanding how this observation relates to my comment, in any way.
Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. The areas that are just developing widespread electricity now will do it far cleaner than the US did, skipping the lower development stages of electricity and jumping directly into the future, if that's what you're saying. But I'm having trouble understanding what you mean.
True, but most people don't think about why that is the case. They'll blame slavery (abolished over 160 years ago), or the "exploitation" by capitalists (that produce wealth for all). Some may claim that the US has more natural resources, but The US is rich because of the freedoms and rights that our citizens have. Look at the poverty of the Soviet Union or Mao's China, or in Cuba today.
I cannot for the life of me understand the increasing popularity of socialism and communism in the US today. Those forms of government have a proven track record of failure.
Let's consider the economies of Communist nations. I suggest we take into account a bit of regional history.
By any measure, China has come a long way since the Communist regime took over in 1949.
You could say something similar about Soviet Russia. By the 1980s it had stagnated, but the average Russian was incomparably better off than in 1917.
How far have Russians come since then? Has capitalism ushered in a golden age of prosperity and well-being? (Here's a clue: life expectancy peaked in 1986.)
Vietnam has done reasonably well since other countries stopped invading it.
American foreign policy hasn't done much for Cubans, either. Especially in the last few months.
Historically speaking over over a billion years almost every species has consumed one thing and output another to the point of extinction while another species that consumes that grows and repeats the cycle.
Climate change has been the story of evolution since life appeared on earth and aglae filled the atmosphere with gasses.
"We"? if by "we" you mean Chinese, then yes, as THEY have maintained a cultural structure and language far longer than we have, and adapting themselves and there environment to do that was something they have been doing successfully for millenia,China still venerates the first engineer "Gun"assigned to control the flooding on the yallu river 3300 years ago, and it is then no surprise that they are building solar, wind and other renewable fossil/carbon free energy sources at an unprecidented rate, and ultra high voltage grid systems to distribute that energy, while we wring our hands committing genocide on the Palistinians.
Oxygen loss already happens, see news about dead fish.
Issue here is that becomes more common and underwater oxygen loss is approaching an “unsafe space” with impacts likely irreversible within human lifetimes, some of which could persist for centuries.
Coastal “dead zones”, impact of fish food etc.
As the link is university press release, here is study mentioned: https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ln...
"Irreversible on human timescales" is a nice succinct wording; I think I usually end up discussing that concept in a less clear / more roundabout way.
Two San Diego posts at once! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49083314
Go team!
The feedback loop between warming and deoxygenation is particularly concerning for deep-water systems that have been stable for millennia. If we hit the thresholds mentioned where the ocean's 'internal clock' is disrupted, it might permanently alter nutrient cycling beyond what current atmospheric models predict. I'm curious if any researchers here have insight into whether localized aeration tech could mitigate this in crucial spawning grounds, or if the scale is simply too vast.
Next post would be what: Human hubris as measured by UN Hubris Measuring Commitee now threatens to collapse the entire solar system into a purple hole?
Can we please snap out of it and use something like if not common sense but at least a Fermi approach? Or did he die in vain?