
Scientists have detected a major change to the Earth’s oceans - seycombi
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/15/its-official-the-oceans-are-losing-oxygen-posing-growing-threats-to-marine-life/?utm_term=.8e8242767461
======
fsloth
Why was it a piece of cake to regulate CFC:s but no one has the vision to
strive to control CO2 and methane. I'm 37 years old. I've been scared of CO2
accumualation in the atmosphere before I went to school and I'm no genious.

I can't understand why has it been so hard recognize and act on CO2.

And it's not only the industry and politicians. Green parties have been the
craziest in actively blocking nuclear power.

Why has this been so hard to see?

~~~
api
There is far more money involved, and unlike CFCs there are no easy plug and
play substitutes.

Nuclear power is not a panacea. It looks good on paper but in practice there
are tons of hidden costs and failures can be catastrophic. It also pretty much
demands hefty regulation, which further adds to the cost in both monetary and
social ways.

Finally there is a whole geopolitical order built around fossil fuels.
Changing our energy system would fundamentally alter the power balance of the
world.

~~~
throwaway5752
Solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear add up to well more than current
usage. Nuclear could be phased out as storage or distributed grid matured.
With modifications to standards of living expectations we could live renewably
as a species and save oil and gas for plastics and other materials that
require hydrocarbon feedstock. The trouble is that this would result in a much
lower consumption world. And lots of people in the are rich as a result
unneccessary consumption.

~~~
nitrogen
"modifications to standard of living expectations" are purely untenable and
ultimately destructive to everything that defines human society. If you really
want to get people to oppose you, try to guilt trip them, tell them they have
to be too cold all winter and too hot all summer, tell them they can never
travel again, cram them into tiny apartments where they can hear every bodily
function their neighbor performs.

The solution to resource depletion and pollution is to give people what they
want in a way that's actually sustainable. Build thicker walls and floors to
block sound and conserve energy. Design more efficient lighting and
appliances. Develop renewable energy. Etc.

Everything non-essential to human survival is everything that makes us human.

~~~
throwaway5752
I would make one quibble. The hard constraint is the sustainable part, the
planet doesn't care about our intangible needs. I'm not saying that everyone
should live in massive planned urban districts, but on average we have to use
less than X energy across Y people, and we are very far away from averaging
X/Y per capita.

~~~
nitrogen
Right, there is an equation of some kind that dictates the energy balance we
can sustain. I'm suggesting that there are more terms to that equation that we
can adjust, and that the term of "what people want" is the most difficult. We
can find ways to increase the planet's energy budget, we can find ways to
increase efficiency, we can even find ways to make people _desire_ more
efficient behaviors.

My main concern, and maybe I misread your first comment, is that forcing or
guilt-tripping or shaming people into less fulfilling lifestyles is not going
to be very productive, IMO.

~~~
throwaway5752
"Right, there is an equation of some kind that dictates the energy balance we
can sustain"

CO2 produced/energy * energy/person * people on Earth

I know it feels like I'm oversimplifying it, but of course this equation just
reduces to the total amount of CO2 produced by humans. There is a ceiling to
the rate we can produce it that is compatible with life as we know it on this
planet, and we are over that ceiling.

We can tune each of those. CO2/energy - solar, wind, and short term bridge of
nuclear; energy/person - more remote work, car sharing, more insulation; # of
people - vaccines, birth control access, and other programs to slow population
growth.

You have to understand, I believe there is a very harsh reality that we have
limited time to solve this problem before we are facing an irrecoverable
disaster. Best regards.

------
neom
I don't know when we as humans are going to fucking get it together and start
acting like a better species. I hope that the rate of climate change will push
us to stop worrying about what bathroom another human decides to use or whom
one selects to love and focus more on the ill's of the collective.

~~~
ianai
I genuinely think people will not change until the worst affects of climate
change begin.

~~~
nickparker
My biggest fear today is that we're already screwed and just don't know it.
This article turned out to be a "We expected this and now we've found it" but
every morning I worry I'll see a headline like this and it'll be "We turned
over this one rock and found something we _didn 't_ expect. Prepare for global
famine in 2 years."

On our current course I'm quite optimistic that we'll be able to turn the ship
around - I think between tech accelerating and the climate itself starting to
put the screws on us, we'll have powerful enough tools and enough resources
poured into them to save ourselves. However, that's if we stay on the apparent
current course. I'm really scared we'll hit a discontinuity of some sort.

~~~
specialist
We know it.

Release of CO2 has entered a positive feedback loop. Thawing tundra, burning
forests, ocean acidification.

Even this we could counter (painfully) with massive industrial scale
sequestration.

What worries me is methane. I'm not sure we can mitigate methane released from
the tundra. And if the stuff tucked under the ocean pops, we're toast.

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

~~~
semi-extrinsic
What I don't get about the positive feedback loop argument is that it seems
completely at odds with what the IPCC is saying, namely limiting emissions in
order to stabilize global warming at 2 degrees.

If we were in a positive feedback loop, then global warming will just continue
to accelerate no matter how small our emissions are. In fact, we'd be equally
screwed if we magically stopped emitting CO2 in 1950, it would just take a
little bit longer before we're screwed.

Can anyone explain how to reconcile these arguments?

~~~
nikdaheratik
Methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere nearly as long which means that, in
theory, it would cause some short term warming, but then the methane would
break down and we would slowly return to more normal levels. There are alot of
unknowns, and while a very worst case scenario involves runaway methane
causing warming, we don't know how likely this is to happen. We do know that
CO2 takes hundreds of years to dissipate and will cause the ice caps to melt
which will lead to higher sea levels overall.

------
codecamper
Put a tax on carbon & market forces will solve everything. We'll have cleaner
cities, and hopefully won't need to worry about runaway climate change. Yeah,
some rich people will suffer, but that's OK they are rich and won't stop being
rich when their industries are forced to change.

~~~
ars
> Put a tax on carbon & market forces will solve everything.

Unless you can get India and China onboard you will solve nothing. You will
just end up moving more manufacturing to those countries. Total CO2 emitted
will not change.

~~~
philipkglass
The West could prevent emissions arbitrage with CO2 tariffs on imports set at
the same cost per ton as the domestic carbon tax. Something like: goods
produced abroad need to have a CO2 audit chain with proven integrity for
imported goods to be CO2-taxed at the manufacturer's claimed emissions
intensity. Otherwise the importing country assumes an unfavorable (high)
default CO2 intensity for goods produced abroad and taxes are high.

That wouldn't necessarily prevent high emissions linked to domestic-only
consumption-and-production in China, India, and other developing nations, but
it would be a powerful incentive as long as those countries have a lot of
trade with the developed world. And it would probably tend to make developing
nations' domestic-production-for-domestic-consumption activity cleaner by
accelerating adoption (and pushing down costs) of lower-carbon technologies
starting in export driven industries.

~~~
ars
That wouldn't help. You can't "target" energy that way because it is fungible.

The country would claim "all exports are made from the renewable energy, and
all hydrocarbon energy is used for internal consumption".

I suppose you could set import tariffs based on the entire country's energy
balance, but then you disincentive any individual producer from doing
anything.

On top of that you can "wash" energy. Make solar cells using hydrocarbon
energy, then import them to another country and claim "see, we are all solar"
\- but of course they aren't since the energy used just came from a different
country.

As free market perfect as it seem, a CO2 tax is impossible in the details
unless it was truly global (which would never work since the incentive for a
country to cheap is enormous).

------
kogepathic
So what can we do about it? Is anyone still seriously working on iron
fertilization to encourage phytoplankton growth? [0]

The main arguments I've heard against it is that we don't know what the effect
will be on the ecosystem:

 _> The side effects of large-scale iron fertilization are not yet known.
Creating phytoplankton blooms in naturally iron-poor areas of the ocean is
like watering the desert: in effect it changes one type of ecosystem into
another_

Well, guess what? We're going to affect the ocean ecosystems negatively if we
don't reduce atmospheric CO2, and I don't see that happening any time soon.
How about we just go for broke and try it out on the off chance it helps
things?

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization)

~~~
nikdaheratik
It's not a great solution for a variety of reasons. First, it costs energy to
extract the iron and dump it in areas of the ocean, so we'd have to do this in
a way that generates less CO2 than it sucks out from the plankton (in which
case, why do we need the plankton?). Second, it will cause large blooms which
suck all of the O2 out of the water and fish will die off in those areas.
Third, if we don't go ahead and reduce emissions, this will maybe buy time but
not solve the actual problem.

These sorts of solutions are only a good idea if we finally get moved over to
a low carbon economy and still find we can't reduce warming any other way.

------
codeisawesome
This is genuinely scary. I'm especially concerned over both the loss of food
to populations, and the suggested nitrous oxide loop for further warming.

~~~
codeisawesome
Could it be that as a species, humans have failed to evolve the intelligence
required for ensuring long term survival, even though we have the short term
ability to manipulate our environment to a certain degree of benefit.

~~~
Filligree
We have enough intelligence to build technological civilization.

Barely. If that had been possible at _any_ lower level of intelligence, then
it would have happened sooner. We're the stupidest possible technological
species.

~~~
daenz
Or maybe the jump from biological to technological is actually really really
ridiculously hard. We didn't evolve in a vacuum...we share and shared the
earth with many other vicious species and environmental effects, and we had to
come out on top. We had to evolve certain behaviors to even make it to the
technological point. And the persistence of those behaviors in our
evolutionary memory is what ensured we survived. And now we're just supposed
to shed them off because of 100 years of technology? People are thinking too
micro. Change does not happen that fast. You can't shed off in-group
preferences, general selfishness, and combativeness because those are the
things that literally pushed us into these higher stages of evolution.

Personally I think the earth isn't fit for a long term evolution of a
technological species, if its environment starts collapsing so soon. Again,
100 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things, and people are arguing
that 100 years of technology is destroying the earth. We need a lot longer
than 100 years to get anywhere useful.

~~~
SomeStupidPoint
Not necessarily -- we just need the 5% of humans who survive the disaster to
be the smart, appropriate-to-advance ones.

Evolution is full of times that a species reached a chokepoint and a subgroup
with a trait was selected for. No reason ecological disaster caused by
technology couldn't be one of those times, even if unfortunate for most
humans.

Heck, global ecological disaster could be viewed as a copy-cat oxygenation
event prompted by intelligent psychopaths to make room for their offspring in
a crowded field.

tl;dr: Humans are just parodying the great oxygenation event with the great
carbonation event.

~~~
daenz
I see your point, but it makes the assumption that there is a good biological
trait to be selected for, and I'm unconvinced that accumulated wealth is a
signal of that trait.

------
laughfactory
We would solve most of this problem if we'd get people to 1) stop buying new
cars unless their previous car had died, 2) stop commuting to work, and 3)
stop living in situations which require lots of driving. If we incentivized
companies to transition all possible staff to remote positions, we'd eliminate
a huge amount of emissions. The problem is that while everyone knows cars
produce a huge amount of emissions, no one is willing to not buy that fancy
new car. I mean, "it gets better gas mileage!", or "it's electric!" passifies
everyone's environmental concerns. Never mind that new car production is
incredibly environmentally unfriendly (in most cases driving an old car, even
one with poorer emissions profile or worse gas mileage, is better on net for
the environment), and that all the commuting we do is disastrous for the
environment. But until the problem is owned at the personal level nothing will
change. A big piece of this is that politicians aren't interested in going to
bat against the auto manufacturers. No politician wants to be linked to the
death of such a huge industry (and a loss of hundreds of thousands or millions
of jobs). The only way this will change is if all of us start to 1) live close
to work (so we can walk, cycle, or simply drive less) or require remote work
options, 2) own fewer and older model cars and drive them until they die, and
3) contact our elected representatives to encourage them to support law and
policy which incentivizes employers to employ remote workers. We would all do
well, too, to remember the three Rs: reduce (our consumption), reuse (buy used
and put off replacing our possessions until absolutely necessary), and recycle
(duh).

But when even climate warriors like Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore show wanton
disregard for the cost of their lifestyle on the environment (apparently they
like to raise a ruckus, but expect others to do something magical about it),
there's little hope for things to get much better any time soon. Talk is
cheap, people; Let's see some real action on a personal level.

------
diafygi
Howdy! I work in cleantech, and I guess it's that time again for your wall of
links about what you can do to fight climate change.

To start, here's my favorite climate change joke: "They say we won't act until
it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"

 _So what can you do about it?_

Work at a new energy technology company! We are currently growing
exponentially[1], and we need as many smart people as we can get. There are
lots of companies hiring software engineers.

 _How do I find a job fighting climate change?_

I'd recommend browsing the exhibitor and speaker lists from the most recent
conference in each sector (linked below).

    
    
        * Energy Storage[2][3]
        * Solar[4][5]
        * Wind[6]
        * Nuclear[7]
        * Electric Utilities[8][9]
        * Electric vehicles[10]
    

Also, if you're in the SF bay area, I'd recommend subscribing to my Bay Area
Energy Events Calendar[11]. Just start showing up to events and you'll
probably find a job really quickly.

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/22/energy-is-the-new-new-
inte...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/22/energy-is-the-new-new-internet/)

[2]: [http://www.esnaexpo.com/](http://www.esnaexpo.com/)

[3]: [https://www.greentechmedia.com/events/live/u.s.-energy-
stora...](https://www.greentechmedia.com/events/live/u.s.-energy-storage-
summit-2016)

[4]: [https://www.intersolar.us/](https://www.intersolar.us/)

[5]:
[http://www.solarpowerinternational.com/](http://www.solarpowerinternational.com/)

[6]: [http://www.windpowerexpo.org/](http://www.windpowerexpo.org/)

[7]: [https://www.nei.org/Conferences](https://www.nei.org/Conferences)

[8]:
[http://www.distributech.com/index.html](http://www.distributech.com/index.html)

[9]: [https://www.greentechmedia.com/events/live/grid-edge-
world-f...](https://www.greentechmedia.com/events/live/grid-edge-world-
forum-2016)

[10]: [http://tec.ieee.org/](http://tec.ieee.org/)

[11]: [https://bayareaenergyevents.com/](https://bayareaenergyevents.com/)

------
aisofteng
>The authors then used interpolation techniques for areas of the ocean where
they lacked measurements.

Speaking as someone that studied pure mathematics more than science, I am
curious as to whether there is formal justification that this interpolation is
valid. As far as I understand, global systems like this often, if not always,
exhibit chaotic behavior.

------
pvaldes
Must be: Sunke Schmidtko, Lothar Stramma and Martin Visbeck have detected a
major change to the Earth's oceans.

------
zouhair
"Total fake news". In other times this comment would mean I am a stupid
person, a wannabe troll but now it is just a sad state of affairs.

------
EGreg
For all the climate change deniers and skeptics that point out WaPo is a
"liberal" outlet as a way to skip even reading the data: How about the
scientific journal Nature ?

[http://www.nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21399](http://www.nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature21399)

While I'm at it, please explain why science has become so politicized by the
political right.

I have _literally_ heard my conservative friends say they think "science is
leftist" and Obama paid off scientists around the world to blow up a global
warming hoax.

Tell me, why would an American political party engage in an elaborate hoax
with scientists around the world, and somehow "pay them all off", just so they
would... what, raise your gas prices? Subsidize clean energy?

For that matter why would scientists around the world spend years studying
complicated subjects, and then decades doing research, and _NEARLY ALL_ accept
a bribe from the leftists of _YOUR_ country to sabotage their own sensors and
models and data?

Finally - and here is the kicker - what are you afraid of if we transition
away from fossi fuels? Electric cars open up electricity to be generated in a
variety of ways. Wind farms have just powered _OVER HALF_ of the central USA.
Investment in solar has just overtaken fossil fuels. There are plenty of jobs
to be made.

Why are the "conservatives" so keen on subsidizing the fossil fuel industry so
the government can pick winners and losers? If fossil fuels become too
expensive, that means more innovation and investment in clean energy
generation!

Where is the economic loss from this? I am always amazed just how much
"Stockholm Syndrome" the conservatives have when it comes to big corporations.
Whatever they do - big bonuses to CEOs, pollution, etc. it is always rabidly
defended by a mob angry that any criticism of their destructive activities,
whether by scientists or by people who lost their jobs, is "socialism" and
"libtards".

Do you really think preventing the rise of sea levels, deforestation and loss
of millions of species through overfishing, factory farms, colony collapse
disorder etc. is going to tank your economy? Isn't this the height of idiocy?

~~~
HalfwayToDice
_" While I'm at it, please explain why science has become so politicized by
the political right."_

I hope I can answer this from a neutral perspective.

The left gave up on implementing global socialism; it was rejecting by the
populations of almost every country in the world, when given a democratic
choice.

Then climate change came along and with it solid scientific evidence. The left
jumped on it as a reason to implement a global anti-capitalist societal change
towards the left. Therefore green issues were hijacked by the left, and the
right responded by being anti-green.

And that's how we ended up in the absurd situation we are in now.

~~~
nikdaheratik
I don't think you can blame this on "the left" whatever that means, any more
than you can stick all of this on a single issue on "the right". And your
points about ideology are just wrong. These are complex coalitions of
politicians with many different reasons behind why they act the way they do,
but this entire "left vs. right" ideology is just _post facto_ reasoning for
the most part.

If you look at "the right" you have:

1\. Religious Conservatives that genuinely believe the Earth is 6000 years old
and Evolution is a complete fabrication. These people have always been anti-
Science. Antivaxxers and climate change denialists are a just the latest round
of this.

2\. People who are employed or supported by the fossil fuel industry. This is
the same unreasonable skepticism that you hear from the Tobacco industry, the
Patent trolls, or any other group with alot of money and few scruples. They
found allies in "the Right" who could use their campaign dollars and didn't
care much about this issue so they just go along with it as it allowed them to
get backing for issues they _do_ care about.

3\. People who just don't like "the left" and believe that if people they
don't like are saying it, it must be false. This is probably the largest bloc.
They don't care about climate change (much) and just follow the lead on this
issue because the people who are saying "climate change isn't happening" also
agree with them on a number of other issues that they do care about.

------
Asmod4n
so long and thanks for all the fish

