
Whales Keep Carbon out of the Atmosphere (2017) - yurisagalov
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whales-keep-carbon-out-of-the-atmosphere/
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samvher
_Scientists have made progress in terms of pinpointing exactly how much carbon
whales keep out of the atmosphere; one study suggests that every year, sperm
whales help sequester as much carbon as 694 acres of U.S. forests do. Another
found that in Hawaii, the swimming motion of 80 whales can absorb the
equivalent carbon of 208 acres of U.S. forests._

The title of this article made me expect more. Unless they mean the 694 acres
is the contribution per whale (the article doesn't provide references).

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danmaz74
These numbers look weird. If only 80 whales in Hawaii are equivalent to 208
acres, then the entire world population of sperm whales should certainly
contribute more than not even 4 times that number. But just 1 sperm whale
contributing almost 4 times what 80 whales contribute in Hawaii also looks
unlikely.

~~~
samvher
They are two different mechanisms though, it could be that the swimming motion
mechanism has a far smaller effect. Google tells me there are 360,000 sperm
whales, that would make the combined effect of the swimming of all sperm
whales similar to that of 60 km x 60 km of forest.

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onion2k
The article mentions eco-tourism and whale watching. I wonder if the carbon
footprint of someone flying to an island, staying there for a week, and taking
boat trips out to whale watch actually results in whales being a net negative
on the environment. If we let them die out so that tourism stopped it could be
a positive for the planet.

(I'm not suggesting we should actually do this though. Whales are pretty
amazing.)

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11235813213455
They should just offer high-resolution virtual tourism or anything. Is Youtube
tourism a thing already?

Tourism or all those non-vital flights are ruining our planet, along with the
high consumerism, which is surely correlated to someone who go visit foreign
countries

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abraae
Tourism should be much harder. Make your way to your destination by bike,
yacht, even if it takes a year to get there.

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adrianN
Once we have UBI we might consider year long "vacations", but before that
making vacations much harder is unlikely to be a popular opinion.

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abraae
It's a spectrum. Sitting in a cafe yesterday, I overheard some people talking
casually about flying the entire family up to Rarotonga to see a concert.

A wealthy relative recently flew from the Philippines to Tokyo and then
returned again - without leaving the airport - so that she could preserve her
super ultra sure miles status.

I myself have occasionally flown LHR to SFO to attend a over or two hour
meeting.

We cannot continue living like this.

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adrianN
I agree, but people who do things like you listed would be the least affected
by making traveling harder.

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truculent
That depends _how_ we make it harder. Frequent flier + domestic flight levies,
for example, can disproportionately affect the behaviours mentioned

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0-_-0
According to the article:

"Whales facilitate carbon absorption in two ways. On the one hand, their
movements — especially when diving — tend to push nutrients from the bottom of
the ocean to the surface, where they feed the phytoplankton and other marine
flora that suck in carbon, as well as fish and other smaller animals."

I wonder if it would be possible to artificially create upwards currents in
the ocean to push up nutrients, you could do the job of a million whales.
Might be cheaper than planting forests...

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Etheryte
Oceans are huge and human machines aren't anywhere near close to being as
efficient as biological machines. It's an interesting idea, but I think we
might see way easier wins by first simply stopping killing whales with
everything else we're doing.

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todd8
In the technical sense, Idon’t agree with your claim that “human [produced]
machines aren’t anywhere near close to being as efficient as biological
machines”. Perhaps you meant that sometimes the least costly way of performing
work for some task involves utilizing a biological process.

On the other, hand I do agree that we should stop killing whales (and perhaps
there is now another reason to stop as well).

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ivanhoe
It's actually phytoplankton that captures the CO2, so what about other kinds
of whales that actually feed on plankton and don't dive as deep as sperm
whales?

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spodek
Read _The Once and Future World_ [https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World-
Nature-Could/dp/030...](https://www.amazon.com/Once-Future-World-Nature-
Could/dp/0307362183) to learn how much more whales there used to be and their
effect on making the environment more stable and able to sustain life.

It's stunning and, I hope, behavior-changing.

I did two video essays on the book, though I didn't cover the parts on whales

\- [http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-
once-...](http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-009-the-once-and-
future-world-8-9-19)

\- [http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-
once-...](http://joshuaspodek.com/your-daily-environment-010-the-once-and-
future-world-august-27-2019)

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kian
Curious here - with everything going on with ocean acidification, would we
really rather sequester carbon dioxide in the oceans, where it will contribute
to the destruction of corals, or leave it in the atmosphere?

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dredmorbius
Much of this research is aimed at understanding present nutrient cycling.
Remediation is secondary.

