
Ocean's Oxygen Starts Running Low (2016) - iagovar
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ocean-s-oxygen-starts-running-low/
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swampthinker
I hate this feeling of hopelessness regarding global warming. It feels like
even if you were a billionaire/massive corp, at some point you would say "wow
we should stop, or else there won't even be a world to spend this money in".

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stingraycharles
I think it's partially related to something akin to the prisoner's dilemma:
it's a world-wide problem, and "we" might not want to take the financial hit
for being the first in leading the cause.

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.

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yodsanklai
I share your feeling, but I also note this contradiction:

> 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.

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bamboozled
Is flying really that bad compared to ocean pollution? I feel like flying is
overall a pretty efficient means of transport, everything is geared towards
efficiency.

Plastic in the oceans, now that’s a mess.

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the8472
Consider a world where every human traveled by plane like you do and where
also every human used recycling as you do. Would you prefer living in that
world?

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35bge57dtjku
[http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2014/07/dri...](http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2014/07/driving_vs_flying_which_is_more_harmful_to_the_environment.html)

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darpa_escapee
> Consider a world where every human traveled by plane like you do and where
> also every human used recycling as you do. Would you prefer living in that
> world?

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)

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spodek
Nobody mentioned reducing pollution and greenhouse emission is the best way to
help the situation so I will -- non-polluting alternatives to flying, eating
meat, heating and cooling (I'm surprised how many people heat their homes in
the winter so they can walk around in shorts), packaged food. Having fewer
children.

As a community, HN seems to think nuclear energy is easy while carpooling or
flying less are misguided wastes of effort.

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TeMPOraL
> _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.

\--

[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.

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Tharkun
That's an interesting perspective, and one I hadn't considered before. I have
to admit that it only fuels my fatalism. If people can't be convinced not to
(e.g.) throw their trash out the window, then I can't help but despair.

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TeMPOraL
I wish I could tell you otherwise; I sometimes try to believe it, but then I
go outside to intermingle with the general population, and all of this is
plainly visible.

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.

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jacquesm
The oceans are by far the most important eco system on the planet, they have
tremendous capacity for healing and regeneration but once that gets pushed too
far there may be no way back. And without the oceans alive the world will be
hungry.

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.

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throwaway9990
Posting from a throwaway because politics.

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](https://youtu.be/EjmtSkl53h4)

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jacquesm
It's George Carlin, not joe, and he was a commedian - a good one - not a
scientist, and his point, in case you missed it was that humans won't
necessarily be around for the earth healing part II.

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.

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mehrdadn
> as apex predators we are extremely dependent on the lower branches of the
> foodchain working properly

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.

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jacquesm
The key is extremely. As an example, DDT sprayed to get rid of certain insects
killed off a large number of birds at the top of the food chain, such trouble
tends to concentrate. So poison the lower levels and the intermediate levels
might survive but the apex species will suffer the most.

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mehrdadn
Oh, if you're referring to biological magnification then yes, but that's not
the problem we're talking about, right? We're talking about global warming,
which leads to species dying off (due to habitat loss, etc.) rather than
staying alive but accumulating toxins... that's where I don't get how things
would be any different if we were lower in the food chain?

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CapitalistCartr
We have many more points of dependency. So a malfunction in the machinery of
life is more likely to be disastrous the further up the pyramid one lives. At
the apex of the pyramid, we are dependent on the entire pyramid being
structurally sound. And consider: we are already in the midst of the worst
die-off of species since the dinosaurs. So the pyramid is already crumbling.

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mehrdadn
> We have many more points of dependency. So a malfunction in the machinery of
> life is more likely to be disastrous the further up the pyramid one lives.

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.

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CapitalistCartr
I'm not "just repeating the claim". If you're at the bottom of the pyramid,
you only need sunlight and water. If half the animals die off, you're fine.
The higher up you are, the more species below on which you are dependent.
You're only dependent on what's below, not what's above. With us at the top, a
50% die-off would be catastrophic.

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mehrdadn
In that case I believe you're saying something else, not answering the
question I had asked. The sentence I replied to was this:

> 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?

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staunch
How many nuclear powered vessels would it take to generate and pump in
sufficient oxygen?

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noiv
Well, considering most of the atmospheric oxygen is produced by phytoplankton
in the ocean that's a receipt for suffocation.

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jacquesm
In a nutshell it is a very nice illustration of how easy misguided attempts to
repair things can be worse than the original problem.

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staunch
Actually, it's a very nice illustration of creative problem solving.

Your totally unnecessary commentary added nothing.

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ZenoArrow
An important topic, but can we at least have some mention of what we can do to
improve oxygen levels in the oceans (aside from reducing the level of
pollution, which is the obvious but slowest to implement solution). Surely
there's something that could be done to tackle this in a more immediate
manner? Are there plants within the ocean ecosystem that convert carbon
dioxide to oxygen?

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tzahola
>It is estimated that between 50% and 85% of the world's oxygen is produced
via phytoplankton photosynthesis.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton)

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ZenoArrow
Thank you, that was the information I was looking for.

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erric
This could very well be humanity’s Great Filter.

