
The Black Sea has lost more than a third of its habitable volume - upen
http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/4831.html
======
PeterWhittaker
Summary: The oxygen-rich habitable layer of the Black Sea has declined over
the last few decades from a depth of 140m to a depth of only 90m. The oxic
layer does not mix with the layers below. All theories as to why the decline
has occurred are speculative, but some believe that the increase in H2S2 at
greater depth may be implicated (though this is unsubstantiated).

~~~
woodandsteel
Your summary is quite inaccurate. As the article explains, the change in
thickness of the oxygen-rich layer is well-explained by global warming and the
addition of nutrients from farming. The H2S2 increase is also explained,
except the causes of its precise depth are not.

In discussing the changes in the Black Sea, it should be noted that Russia is
heavily invested in fossil fuel production, and that Putin denies the reality
of anthropocentric global climate change. This leads me to the possibility
that the purpose of your comment is to divert criticism of Russia. Of course,
that idea might be mistaken, and you honestly just misunderstood the article.

~~~
ivan_gammel
I do not think Russia must be solely responsible for what's going on there.
Russian government and Putin himself does recognize artificial nature of
climate change, as was shown in his speech on Climate Change Conference in
2015. Truth is that Russia did not make big contribution to it in last 25
years (yes, there's huge oil and gas industry, but most of it is being
exported, so it's a responsibility of consumers to use it in emission-neutral
way). Current emissions are more than 25% below 1990 levels - can you say such
thing about America, China or India? And this happens not only due to reduced
output, but also because of some investment in more environmentally friendly
manufacturing (yes, Russia has ecological standards and they are enforced -
unfortunately, not fully because of corruption). There exist government-
sponsored programmes to invest in green energy (e.g. new manufacturing
facilities for solar panels), close the top polluters (like BTsBK) and reduce
car emissions. It's not that easy to transform such a big economy and fix all
the issues of Soviet planning, so it will take time to change and become as
green as e.g. Germany (I doubt it's even possible to start something costly
like Energiewende in Russia at this moment).

~~~
woodandsteel
The reason Russia produces so much in the way of fossil fuels is that Putin
decided when he was a doctoral student in economics back in the 1990's that
the Russian economy should focus through about 2150 on increasing the
extraction of natural resources.

He makes this clear in the summary for his doctoral dissertation:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-
dish/archive/2008/08/putins...](http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-
dish/archive/2008/08/putins-thesis-raw-text/212739/)

~~~
ivan_gammel
Do not take seriously doctoral dissertations of anyone in Russian government
but few people with academic background. They are written not to make
scientific contribution, but to get "d.something.n." prefix (doctor of some
sciences) and a line in CV. They have nothing to do with their real position
or policy they enact or implement. Actually, some dissertations may be even
written by other people (see Dissernet data mining project to reveal
corruption in this field).

In Russia the only policy you can know for sure is the codified policy. Public
statements cannot be treated seriously until they are codified, because very
often they are made as means of information warfare, messages to specific
groups of special interests. Look at the laws, court decisions, government
orders etc. Sometimes you can figure out what's really going on only
retrospectively, by looking at statistics and filtered stream of the news.

~~~
woodandsteel
The reason I included this link is because Putin in his governance of Russia
has followed the general economic strategy he presents in his doctoral
dissertation, and so the document helps us understand the reasoning behind his
decisions.

As to codified policy, Putin is an authoritarian ruler in a country with
little rule of law, and so he does what he wants, no matter what the laws
happen to say.

ivan_gammel, I strongly suspect that you are quite aware of all of this, and
are attempting to mislead readers as to what Putin is up to and why.

Let me make one more comment. Putin believes that the road to becoming an
advance industrial power is first spend a half a century focused on natural
resource extraction, and only then turn to developing advanced industry. I
think he is here trying to emulate his interpretation of the economic history
of the UK and the US.

But this mistaken, and in two ways. First, in the US and the UK mineral
extraction and industrial development proceeded in parallel, not sequentially.
Secondly, more recently countries have industrialized by focusing on industry
directly, and especially exports, as in the cases of Japan, China, and South
Korea.

I think part of the problem here is that Putin greatly mistrusts
industrialization that is successful enough to compete on global markets,
because it requires independent commercial enterprises, and he is an
authoritarian who wants to retain control of the economy, and this is much
easier when you are focused on natural resource commodities.

In any case, the whole matter of Putin and his economic views just illustrates
the general problem that Russians have never figured out how things work in
the modern world, and are always trying to do things in ways that are still
half back in the authoritarian, agrarian ways of their past. As a result they
get off on paths that succeed for a few decades, but eventually stall out.

It's so sad, Russia could be such an amazing nation if it could just get on
the right track.

~~~
woodandsteel
There's something else here, too. For thousands of years, national wealth and
power were largely based in natural resources such as agricultural land and
gold mines. In the industrial revolution, new natural resources, especially
fossil fuels, were added, but wealth and power shifted mainly to manufactured
goods. That is why you can have great industrial powers like Japan, China, and
South Korea that are relatively poor in natural sources. And it is why Russia,
even though it has natural resources far beyond any other nation, is about
10th in the size of its economy.

The problem with Putin is his mind is still partly back in the pre-industrial
era, and so he only half gets this. He knows Russia has to industrialize, but
he still sees natural resources as being much more important than they really
are, and so he is simply on the wrong economic track.

A key case here is petroleum. It accounts for half the Russian government's
tax revenues, and it is central to Putin's plans and investments. But thanks
to the renewable energy revolution, based on manufactured technologies like PV
cells and giant wind turbines, in half a century petroleum will be largely
replaced, and so worth very little. But Putin doesn't get this, which is why
so little effort is being put into renewables.

~~~
ivan_gammel
First of all, Russia is already post-industrial state and it experienced
multiple industrialization waves in its history - from colonization of Urals
(there were the biggest manufactures in the world in XVIII century and there's
a special term for that amazing period of history of Urals region - Mountain
Manufacturing Civilization introduced by Russian writer and historian Alexey
Ivanov), to industrialization in late XIX century (with such projects as
Trans-Siberian railway and production shifting to European part of Russia), to
industrialization by Stalin in 1930s and finally industrial expansion of
1950-1980s. It's all in the past now, not least because Russia lost most of
its industry in competition with China and hi-tech manufacturing to the West.
Indeed, Russia is a petrostate now, but it still has large industrial
capacity, to name some in which there's some good progress - aerospace (how
many nations are capable of creating new civil and military aircraft
designs?), arms, automotive (very hot sector with big investments and non-stop
race on building new plants). It's not feasible and already too late to
compete with China or emerging economies like Vietnam in light industries or
consumer electronics, but some targeted efforts to join global manufacturing
chains are already paying (e.g. did you know that sapphire glass for Apple
products is made in Russia?)

Putin's mistake is not that it applies XVI century resource extraction
approach to finally get industrial economy (which is not true because of
above), but that it applies command-administrative methods of XX century to
build post-industrial economy. He is more interested in playing war games,
than writing economic strategies - this job is left to his advisers, and
there's ongoing competition to fill that position between liberals like
A.Kudrin and communists like S.Glazyev. These bureaucratic battles did not
produce any document that could be fully implemented, so significant progress
could be visible in only some technical fields, which are far from politics
(hence very smart Central Bank, Federal Tax Service or Ministry of
Informatization and Communications).

~~~
PerfectDlite
> Russia is already post-industrial state

> Russia lost most of its industry in competition with China and hi-tech
> manufacturing to the West.

Congratulaions, you've managed to contradict yourself in one paragraph.

~~~
dragonwriter
A post-industrial state is one which was dominantly industrial, and has moved
on to some other primary basis for its economy, usually because it is engaged
in international trade and its comparative advantage is no longer in
manufacturing but some other area.

Usually, this shift in comparative advantage is reflected in industrial work
moving overseas to competitors whose comparative advantage _is_ in that kind
of work.

So, the two sentences you quote as a supposed contradiction actually support
each other, rather than contradicting each other.

~~~
PerfectDlite
> A post-industrial state is one which was dominantly industrial, and has
> moved on to some other primary basis for its economy, usually because it is
> engaged in international trade and its comparative advantage is no longer in
> manufacturing but some other area.

In case of Russia it wasn't so, they still struggle to get back to Soviet
level of industrialization after USSR fell apart.

~~~
dragonwriter
> In case of Russia it wasn't so, they still struggle to get back to Soviet
> level of industrialization after USSR fell apart.

The US keeps struggling to maintain or restore its previous level of
industrialization, too, even though its unmistakeably a post-industrial state;
there's a lot of emotional attachment to industrialization as a source of
economic output that lingers even in post-industrial states, so struggling to
restore it is a common response to dissatisfactory economic experiences even
in post-industrial states. If Russia were struggling to get back to Soviet-era
aggregate or per-capita economic output, that would be a difference -- and
there certainly was a time, throughout much of the 1990s, where that was the
case. But its not now (though Russia has seen a precipitous output drop since
the peak in 2012, so it might be a thing again in not too long.)

(Russia may be in a situation now -- especially with the recent drop -- where
living conditions for the masses are as bad or worse than in the late Soviet
era, but that's orthogonal to the economy being post-industrial, and more
about the _distributional_ features of the economy than anything else.)

~~~
woodandsteel
Here is the wikipedia explanation of the term "post-industrial"

"In sociology, the post-industrial society is the stage of society's
development when the service sector generates more wealth than the
manufacturing sector of the economy"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
industrial_society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-industrial_society)

That doesn't apply to Russia, so ivan_gammel was using the term in an
unconventional manner.

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shmerl
Hydrogen sulfide area is like a death zone in the depth of the Black Sea.

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wildeswildes
Hydrogen sulfide is in deep of Black See is deadly area. If clean water
contamined by h2s2 most of will die about it.

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simplemath
>The link you are accessing has been blocked by the Barracuda Web Filter
because it contains spyware. The name of the spyware is:
Spyware.Exploit.BRTS.sciencebulletin.org

~~~
andrewjf
Are these web filter things generally accurate?

~~~
simplemath
False positives are a thing... but just thought it was worth mentioning that
it was flagged for me.

