
Sea Change – The Pacific's Perilous Turn - tylerwr
http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/pacific-ocean-perilous-turn-overview/
======
revscat
Like many who visit HN, I am an atheist. I am coming to believe, however, that
the production of CO2 is the greatest sin, in the religious sense, that exists
today. It dwarfs all other problems -- Syria, terrorism, the NSA, class and
economic disparity, all of them.

Being technologists we tend to assume (hope?) that some solution will present
itself before it is too late. I am growing increasingly pessimistic that such
a solution will arise. The powers that be in our world are dedicated to
economics, not science, and certainly not to the environment. Their altars are
derivatives and overnight lending rates, of war and spying, of realpolitik and
power.

Humanity, I do not think, is likely to survive this coming apocalypse without
widespread civil uprisings against the current power establishment, and with
it a sea change in what is viewed as unethical or sinful: unnecessary CO2
production being viewed as the great evil that is is, an existential threat to
every extant political, religious, and economic group.

Instead we have the Koch brothers, Apple vs. Google flame wars, and the
expenditure of almost unbelievable energies on wars and political positioning.

It's insane. I don't think humanity will survive into the 22nd century, and it
will be our own damn fault for not rising up and removing those power
structures that lead us to this point.

~~~
patrickg_zill
Fukushima possibly contaminating the entire Pacific, making any seafood from
there not able to be eaten, is not as bad as a little more CO2?

By the way, not 1 word in the article, filled with all sorts of scary quotes,
about diatoms and their role in CO2 sequestration.

~~~
comicjk
> possibly

Except that's not possible, even for a Chernobyl-level release of radioactive
material. You might as well suggest that Chernobyl made all food from Britain
to Afghanistan inedible. We can detect material from Fukushima in the Pacific,
but only because we have the technology to detect radiation in infinitesimal
amounts.

~~~
patrickg_zill
You do know, that even now, there are wild boars (hunted for sport in Germany)
that cannot be eaten due to too-high levels of radioactivity, right?

see [http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-
Wires/2011/0401/R...](http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-
Wires/2011/0401/Radioactive-boars-in-Germany-a-legacy-of-Chernobyl)

And I have suggested nothing of the sort about Chernobyl rendering all food
inedible... the type of accident, the fact it is water-borne rather than wind-
borne, and that there is nearly 10 times the amount of nuclear material at
Fukushima (1600 tons) vs Chernobyl (180 tons) make for a very different
situation.

(I am not even including the spent fuel rods which Reuters amongst other news
sources, claims are very dangerous if not handled properly:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/fukushima-
nuclear-p...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/fukushima-nuclear-
plant-cleanup_n_3752046.html) )

Besides, it has been more than 2 years and no covering of Fukushima has been
done, whereas in Chernobyl they erected a cover over the reactor within 6
months.

What we do know as part of the historical record, is that the operator, TEPCO,
has been lying or at least, shading the truth, about the severity of the
situation all along.

------
yetanotherphd
The most important component of a strategy to reduce CO2 emissions is a carbon
tax, which is economically equivalent to a cap-and-trade system. However,
people involved in tech seem to be especially prone to what I call a "problem
solving" bias: discrete problems require discrete solutions, and we just have
to figure out if the right solution is solar, nuclear, or the Savory
Institute. The (correct) economic point of view is that there are many
possible solutions, and a carbon tax properly incentivizes implementing all of
them.

On the issue of China, because their _per capita_ emissions are so low, and
any reasonable global cap and trade system would allocate CO2 emissions rights
to countries on a per-capita basis (or at least per-capita indexed to some
base year like 1960), China is not actually the bad guy, and under a fair cap
and trade system they would be net sellers of CO2 credits not the other way
around. However too many people are blinkered by anti-Sinitism to accept this
fact.

~~~
indefatigable
Giving politicians the authority to levy a carbon tax is an absolutely
terrible idea, and it has nothing to do with how I feel about China.

~~~
yetanotherphd
I believe that the idea that China is obstructing a global carbon tax (among
supporters of such a tax) mainly comes from racism and is not supported by the
facts. However, people oppose global/national carbon taxes for a number of
reasons unrelated to racism. I'm not sure why you are concerned with the
authority to levy a carbon tax, since (1) such a tax would almost certainly be
beneficial and (2) politicians already have essentially unlimited legal
authority to raise taxes of any sort.

~~~
indefatigable
We seem to disagree, as I'm convinced that a carbon tax would almost certainly
be an unmitigated disaster.

------
mindblink
Nicely done media-rich layout for an extremely important, if thoroughly
depressing subject. Personally, I had a hard time slogging through it, due to
the overwhelming nature of it all. We need more great coverage like this.
Great job, Seattle Times!

------
sliverstorm
Good thing we're shutting down nuclear reactors and spinning up coal plants.

------
DanBC
What can I, as an individual with no money nor power, do to help stop this?

I can reduce my energy use as far as possible. Apart from the online stuff I'm
pretty low CO2. I can reduce, reuse, and recycle. (I need to get better at
that.)

But what else can I do?

~~~
geedy
Crowd fund energy initiatives. Depending on your views on various energy
sources, i.e. solar, take a look at

[https://www.sunfunder.com/](https://www.sunfunder.com/)
[https://joinmosaic.com/](https://joinmosaic.com/)

Also, don't become too pessimistic. Even here, its pretty obvious that people
tend to fall into two camps: doomers or deniers. Very few in between. I have
spent the better part of a year struggling with depression related to the
realization of the scale of environmental and sustainability issues facing
civilization. I was a doomer, and some days, I still am. That said, I also see
that the uptake of renewable energy is accelerating. Electric car sales were
considered negligible two years ago, and now they are growing fast. Thats not
to say that there aren't HUGE challenges facing us. But I also feel more
hopeful that things will eventually change in time.

~~~
prawn
On top of that, opportunities to address the challenges faced can be exciting,
especially in the business world. Not all doom and gloom if you look at it
that way.

------
w0rd-driven
Is the problem that we're simply creating more CO2 than can be manufactured
back into O2 by plants? Would the practicality of a "CO2 vent to space" work?
We vent the excess but obviously not everything considering we wouldn't want
to destroy all plant life on earth (and subsequently our own in the process).
The one major downside is if this wasn't tightly controlled and a "leak"
happened we could foster the end of life on the planet. It looks like ocean
acidification would do that already so if it'd be the lesser of two evils I'd
go for the one we could control.

The more obvious choice is to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. How's
that really been going all this time? Yeah that's what I thought. Rock? Meet
Hard Place.

~~~
kaybe
The problem is that the carbon cycle is pretty much closed at the plant side.
They create O2, but during burning, rotting or other biological activity it
gets transformed into C02 again. You can see this in the data - during the
northern hemisphere winter CO2 goes up, during summer it goes down. There's
also a similar day-night cycle.

What happens then is that more CO2 is added, and it seems to be clear at this
point that the plants are not keeping up - even losing ground due to land use
change and deforestation.

Main carbon sinks are ocean uptake (the problem discussed in the article),
weathering and the small amounts of organic matter that sink below the
ground/sea/lakes without rotting (and which will create new coal and oil in
time).

Apart from the first point, these processes happen on geologic time scales.
(Also, shells of small sea animals, but again a miniscule factor. Those will
be the next lime rocks.)

What you suggest is a new sink for carbon. However, it would probably cost
more energy than can be gotten from fossil fuels because gravity. (Sry, too
tired to run the calculations right now.)

------
javajosh
Just out of curiosity, is there anything objectively _better_ about colorful
coral than the drab and dreary sea-life? The implication is that we should be
upset that our sea life is about to get less pretty.

~~~
socialist_coder
If you read the article or watched the video it answers your question.

------
moocowduckquack
So, how do we build solar faster?

The energy is there, there is ~89 petawatts of incoming solar hitting the
ground and we apparently use ~18 terawatts and it looks technically achievable
using current technology, so the main restriction would seem to be production
capacity and capital costs.

~~~
jallmann
We'd have to cover too much land with solar panels. What we need are more
nuclear power plants, but no one will build them anymore.

~~~
yk
You need something like half of the Sahara to produce the global primary
energy consumption from solar panels alone. [1] ( Or the next few largest
deserts combined.) So this is certainly not easy, but it is on the scale of
doable. On the other hand, there are reasons why no one has ever tried to
finance a nuclear power plant out of his own pockets, it is basically a bet on
the interest rate of the next 30 years. ( And besides, we see in Germany that
nuclear power gets slaughtered in the market when there is too much renewable
energy. [2])

[1] 100 TW primary energy, 100 W/m^2 for solar irradiation on earth and 20%
efficiency of the solar cells. Then you need 5e6 m^2.

[2] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-22/windmill-boom-
curbs...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-22/windmill-boom-curbs-
electric-power-prices.html)

~~~
moocowduckquack
_[1] 100 TW primary energy_

An article by MIT claims 14TW - [http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/energy-
scale-part1-1024.h...](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/energy-scale-
part1-1024.html) \- and I've seen figures from 12TW to 20TW bandied around and
I tend to use 18TW when running the numbers, but I have never seen an estimate
as high as 100TW. Where's that figure from?

~~~
yk
Ups, good catch. It is from a old blog post from myself [1]. The reasoning was
10 billion people, with first world energy needs ( 10 kW). The alternative to
use this number is, that you get a safety factor of 6 to account for using
solar as baseload, weather and everything else that dissipates energy.

Edit: Additionally, the power of solar panels used is for England, not the
Sahara. The purpose of the posting was essentially a back of the envelope
calculation with pessimistic assumptions.

[1] [http://yoshi-k.de/2008/09/die-plausibilitat-der-
solarenergie...](http://yoshi-k.de/2008/09/die-plausibilitat-der-
solarenergie/) ( German)

~~~
moocowduckquack
You don't need to get everyone in the world to be consuming more energy than
the average European to have converted most energy to solar though. I am all
for using fudge-factors to allow for rough data, but I don't see the point in
starting a calculation with completely fictional data when there is data
available.

~~~
yk
Well, I like my 100% renewable future with flying cars. So I allow for some
growth of energy consumption.

~~~
moocowduckquack
Flying cars? Ok, I'm sold, half the Sahara it is.

------
tsotha
This is the real danger from extra CO2.

~~~
jessaustin
You read TFA! I wish it were surprising how many here didn't, before climbing
up on their soapbox.

------
ISL
Wow! This is a sea change for the Seattle Times, too. The Times is a
newspaper. This is the first time I've seen anything approaching this quality
in video form from them. Strong work.

------
jensenbox
Nice pun in the title.

------
rickjames28
_Like many who visit HN, I am an atheist. I am coming to believe, however,
that the production of CO2 is the greatest sin, in the religious sense, that
exists today_

Yes, global warming has become the religion of leftists.

~~~
mikeyouse
This is such a ridiculous statement.

Leftists like Bill Gates, Newt Gingrich, John Hunstman, Frederick Smith, Susan
Collins, Tim Pawlenty?

Cap and Trade was a free-market republican idea originally [1], but now that
it's being advocated by the 'Leftists', it's become much more politicized.

A plurality of scientists agree that steps should be taken, the FUD denial is
all paid for by a dozen companies who stand to profit from additional delays,
yet it's somehow comparable to 'religion' to think that we should take action?

[1] - [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-
Min...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Blue-
Sky-Thinking.html?c=y&story=fullstory)

~~~
indefatigable
Most scientists agreed that fire involved phlogiston not so very long ago.

~~~
Steko
Thank god the coal companies of the day discredited them. Oh no, it was
science that discarded phlogiston? Carry on.

------
indefatigable
Since regulating CO2 is such a useful political tool, it's not surprising that
a new hypothesis justifying regulation has been making its way into the
mainstream as the global warming movement collapses.

I doubt that the researchers involved are interested as much in the politics,
but it's fair to say that they wouldn't be getting a fancy new media campaign
if their results didn't support the movement. Remember Marcott et al?

~~~
Steko
"as the global warming movement collapses"

...

"Remember Marcott et al?"

Sorry most of us dont frequent bonkers climate denialism blogs. There's
nothing there to the foaming at the mouth over Marcott:

[http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/climate-science-
once-...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/climate-science-once-again-
finds-itself-fighting-with-hockey-sticks/)

 _Unfortunately, almost all of the controversy was completely off-target, and
a lot of it displayed a significant misunderstanding of the claims of the
Marcott paper._

