While this paper is interesting for identifying an interesting relatively unstudied carbon sink, I am confident no one on this website, including me, is in a good position to understand all the implications of it. I found the conclusions to be pretty complex and speculative. All in all, all it shows is that we have no idea what's going to happen and when.
Also, we aren't necessarily doomed if we were willing to actually try anything.
No one wants to try nuclear for reals because people are frightened of it and world governments don't have an economic interest in building more nuclear.
We don't have an equivalent of an "operation warp speed" for developing next-gen CO2 scrubbing technology. I guess that's just not as cool to people as building tunnels under LA or launching cars into space.
Speaking of algae, we're not turning wasteland into algae farming ponds and developing more useful algae because, well, I don't really know. Even with CRISPR-Cas9 being in relative infancy, GMO algae seems like a low hanging fruit for not only removing carbon from the atmosphere but being a food source in places around the world where food is scarce. I mean, as an individual you can buy a kit that has what you need to genetically modify yeast to glow with jellyfish genes, so how far off are we from making species like chlorella more practical? Maybe it's because nobody wants to eat pond scum.
All I know is that the amount of effort we are putting into these solutions, although there is some effort in each of them, really doesn't add up to the message we are being told about climate change. It's both extremely disappointing and cause for raised eyebrows.
> Also, we aren't necessarily doomed if we were willing to actually try anything.
I maintain that, given how the majority of tax rebates and financial aid is still going to fossil fuels, unless we kick people out of that option for good, they will latch to the last dollar of subsidy or political donation until human life on Earth is beyond hope. The only way to kickstart changes and investments is to put executives in front a judge for the mass murders that are already well documented and be clear that they will be held responsible for the millions of deaths related to unusual climate events.
How did we stop populist from legally raising to position of power against after the 1940s? Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. Climate disruption is a much bigger threat and needs a gesture at least as big.
There have also been several articles on HN about his exact topic lately. I think this reaction is based on the current energy crysis and it seems to force things to move along
> No one wants to try nuclear for reals because people are frightened of it and world governments don't have an economic interest in building more nuclear
Well it's also worth noting that it's become like that because of the oil lobby's decades of scaremongering and the oversupply of natural gas which makes those plants the most profitable choice.
But still it's mostly a NIMBY problem. If smaller, mass produced, gen 4 reactors could be set up in some uninhabited areas we'd basically solve all that.
> Speaking of algae, we're not turning wasteland into algae farming ponds and developing more useful algae because, well, I don't really know.
One of the reasons is that, according to many environmental activists, there is no such thing as “wasteland” that you could develop with minimal loss to environment. This is not a theoretical concern: read up on Ivanpah solar power plant, built in the middle of the literal desert, the place as deserving the designation of “wasteland” as any other place in the US. Activists forced the developers to spend tens of millions of dollars on relocating the desert tortoises living in that wasteland, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per tortoise - and that’s not even including the litigation costs. This also resulted in reduction of scope of the plant, reducing the total installed capacity, and reducing the amount of carbon-free energy we will get out of it.
The lesson here is that if the environmental activists are not happy about building solar power plant in the middle of remote desert, they won’t be happy about building literally anything else. They’re totally BANANAs: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
Dude in BC they pretend a pod of orcas is a separate species because orcas aren’t endangered so they had to invent a species with 73 members so they could have something to complain about.
> Dude in BC they pretend a pod of orcas is a separate species because orcas aren’t endangered so they had to invent a species with 73 members so they could have something to complain about.
Sometimes scientists do genetic analysis and find things, yep.
We don't do this because we are drama queens, It just happens that murica has some unique cetacean species and they are experiencing a sharp decline by unclear reasons. Some people repeating the same stupid jokes about activists since 1960's don't help to provide any solution.
All seen the same to you? Can you spot the differences?
They look different but look at homo sapiens, the variance is quite a bit less. They definitely look like the same species to me.
Also there’s a huge difference between a species doing poorly and the species changing its habits / dominant feeding areas, especially for species that are highly nomadic.
Genetically different microsatellite DNA and mitochondrial DNA.
Unique vocalisations than don't share with offshore, transient or northern resident orcas. Never had seen in company of the other resident orcas. And northern resident orcas don't go South of Oregon.
The 80% of its diet is chinook salmon, therefore they are clearly different in diet, hunt techniques and ecology than offshore or transient orcas. And very different also to the subantartic type (D).
This mean also that we aren't prey, and they tolerate [1] humans that behave and keep the distance (I wouldn't put my money on the bigger meat eater species being so tolerant to us.
> They are highly nomadic
Some orcas are nomadic, other not so much. Resident orcas are, hum... resident. Is in the name. They migrate North and South of the west coast following the salmons but will not end in the Mediterranean, for example.
[1] Of course if you attack any orca or try to approach a cub in the sea and they see it as harassment, the family will react and you will be in a serious trouble.
The entire "is it a different species" discussion is missing the point, because their protection status isn't based on them being a different biological species, so the initial claim of "pretending they are a different species" already doesn't make sense.
Until orcas learn how to teleport is not probable that they would mate with another whale that will never share the same space with them at the same time. Not speaking about the different size, "culture" and language that could be an obstacle if they would eventually meet. This planet is big enough to have more than one species of orca adapted to different habitats. If you lose one, don't expect the other taking its place in the same ecosystem necessarily.
They haven't. It's a population of Orcas, even Canadian government sources explicitly label it as being Orcinus orca (i.e. Orcas, no special biological species).
I'm working on this direction, with an very specific seaweed that solve this problem now and doesn't need freshwater or fertilizers. If anyone is interested reach me on my profile.
In which case I would have to take a step back and think about the world for a bit. Is there a possibility when it gets warmer / more carbon rich, the carbon-hungry microbes go to town, reducing temperatures (*eventually, maybe not over time periods important to humans?)
If the world's microbiome is geared to maintaining (rather than merely existing in / responding to) temperatures and atmospheric gas ratios within a fine margin that would be noteworthy.
I've probably drunk too much and it's too late at night for this conversation to be honest. I probably shouldn't have even pressed "reply".
The thing is there are hundreds of negative and positive feedbacks, and they’re all modeled by people whose job is to think of these things. You are not going to think of something novel unless you are an expert in a related field. Your curiosity is not a bad thing. As a climatologist I’ve heard so many versions of “climate models don’t account for X” where X has been modeled since the 1980s that it just kind of triggers me.
The error bars of the IPCC report are our best guess on what we think we know about uncertainty. Sure, we could end up outside of it, on some heretofore unknown feedback, but it’s like betting our collective future on a longshot horse. The same applies to the assuming it will be much worse.
I think I get what you're saying, and I think I agree - generally I defer to the advice of people who are experts in a field for that reason - it's your profession and what you do for a living. I'm a computer programmer / software architect with a side interest in chaos theory. While I understand models and algorithms so I get complex dynamical systems, my domain knowledge is decidedly NOT climate science - I spend more time pushing pixels at the end of the day.
Similar to the recent / ongoing pandemic, there's tons of variables and I've made a similar argument to people who decry in a mocking tone the "scientists" with their "agendas" etc... like dude these are people individually who devoted ten years of education and research MINIMUM learning about one specific thing.. BEFORE they were taken seriously enough to even get a job. Pushing pixels and shovelling dirt are both important and necessary, but when it comes to complex matters, listen to the person who made a lifetime commitment to studying that thing. I get it, and apologies if I somehow sounded like I was brushing that away. As you say, I'm just curious.
So anyway I'll take this all with a grain of salt. Seems interesting but as you imply it's a bit overhyped. It's just another small wheel within an intricate mechanism of gears and the overall swing of the machine is to hotter temperatures, more carbon dioxide, nothing changes, the overall trend is still clear. As I say, I was probably too drunk to hit reply, but I'm glad I did.
Thanks for the reply, it gave me a chance to pause and reflect.
Well, I used to do it for a living when I was a graduate student. Now I haul bits from the bit mines, like you. As I said before, it’s okay to be curious. It’s okay to be hopeful too. You have a pretty good attitude, which is why I bothered to reply. You learn to spot the closed minds.
But it is not okay to pin our hopes on the unknown — not in this case, when so much is already known. The hype is problematic; cherry-picking research that helps one’s argument is the political problem of climate science. There are plenty of negative feedbacks, and I knew professors who made their grant money by picking topics that made the climate crisis sound less crisisish. The research was good and so was the money, but their reputations suffered from being one-sided.
And that’s not to say scientific consensus can’t be profoundly wrong. The amyloid plaque hypothesis, for one. Geology accepted continental drift, essentially its central dogma, less than a hundred years ago, after much wringing of hands. But climate models have verified predictions. And climate is such a vast problem that “a related field” I mentioned earlier is essentially all of the Earth sciences, physical sciences, and biological sciences to some degree, because the Earth-atmosphere-hydrosphere system is vast. But that means we also have millions of eyes looking for bugs and corner cases.
This is a good question! And it’s clear youre not asking this in bad faith (the line of thinking that CO2 is good for humanity & the planet is a common climate misinformation tactic)
I’m not an expert on this stuff but from what I’ve read over the course of millennium. The Earth will achieve balance again (assuming no further human intervention)
For all practical reasons that won’t work for us. Using microbes as a carbon removal solution is a real potential solution! Specifically using microbes in place of fertilizers as a technique to improve soil health (which would increase soil organic carbon). Although it’s not 100% clear how well that carbon will be stored for the long term.
I’m oversimplifying the science no doubt but we can harness microbes to our benefit.
No for sure I'm strongly of the mind that greenhouse gases do their job in creating a greenhouse, which increases temperature over time (which means more energy in the global system, which means everything from stronger storms to longer droughts...)
As a layperson I've read about the Vostok cores and understand how closely correlated CO2 concentrations and dust are as proxies for global temperature. Also I've read up on how phytoplankton essentially are the reason we have oxygen to breathe, so there are risks like ocean acidification that could kill us all regardless of temperature.
If some of those little buggers can give us an out or at least give us a longer grace period to sort our stuff out, I want in.
Anything that needs carbon in its metabolism will, naturally, use what's available.
Biological systems are tricky, though. If you dump a huge amount of fruit into a forest, the animals will eat it and grow in number; then, so will their predators. Animals who don't eat the fruit but are eaten by the predators will be in a bad spot. That leads to consequences all over the food web. Plus, dumping large amounts every year also changes the soil chemistry and changes what grows there.
Similarly, higher CO2 decreases water pH (more acidic) and can cause fast-growing algae to bloom (which decreases light penetration to the water beneath, and the algae may produce toxins).
Even when high-level equilibria are reached (which they eventually would, one way or another), they won't necessarily be the same or come pleasantly.
(edit: but I almost forgot - it would be mindblowing if it turned out the Earth was somehow tuned to bring itself back to some average. The millions of different chemical combinations and seasonal variations all mediated by the ecosystem - which seems rather fragile but what if it was brutally rigid. I guess it's had a couple of billion years to gear itself up?)
It basically already is tuned to maintain an average, just as a buffer solution can oppose changes in pH. It maintains a temperature level above what we'd otherwise expect, and our unnatural oxygen atmosphere.
If we do nothing, it is unlikely to run away, but it will take rather longer than a human timescale to put it back to a comfortable level, and there could be a lot of damage over the next century.
No that’s just not true. Carbon does persist in soil. For how long is a very different question.
Once Soil Organic Carbon is converted to Microbial Organic Matter it is much more robust.
But the threats that climate change bring also threaten the stability of land ecosystems (drought, increased forest fires, etc) which will release the carbon stored in the soil.
So we shouldn’t rely on soil alone to sequester carbon(nor should it make up the bulk of our sequestration portfolio), but to claim it doesn’t persist in soil is a false statement.
Sorry you're just wrong or focussing on a topic not the one at hand. Of course SOC is good for soil health. But for sequestration over any meaningful time frame you need to go below plow depth.
For further reading the best long term study of which I am aware on SOC via cover cropping (and that's all that we are interested in here is long-term) over 19 years found actual losses of carbon not gains at the soil depths that are important. [0]
... If we only measured soil C in the top 30 cm, we would have assumed an increase in total soil C increased with WCC alone, whereas in reality significant losses in SOC occurred when considering the 2 m soil profile. Ignoring the subsoil carbon dynamics in deeper layers of soil fails to recognize potential opportunities for soil C sequestration, and may lead to false conclusions about the impact of management practices on C sequestration....
You have touched on the property about systems that people don't really internalize well. When you're inside and part of a system and perturb it, the impact of the perturbation may activate parts of the system that you were unaware existed.
But it is also true that if you say, "Climate change is really only a big deal for the currently dominant flora and fauna, the planet as an ecosystem has been in many different states from ice ball to volcanic hell hole." :-) In geologic time it doesn't "matter" at all.
It is a good paper, and I've added it to the list of things that are changing that may influence climate changes (another is what happens with cloud formation when we have more moisture in the air due to rising atmospheric average temperatures, the IPCC model gives one result if we get more stratospheric clouds, and another if we get more clouds in the troposphere.)
Good question. I think at the very least it shows that in a highly complex systems with many components unknown to us it is very difficult to predict the future. We shouldn’t stop trying though and update our models accordingly.
>Inb4 'all words are made up' etc etc boring thread
You admit your point is baseless but haven't internalized it emotionally, I guess.
"Terra" is "Earth" in Latin, and "teren" is Romanian for "ground". Can't "terran" be a shorthand for "terrESTRIAL" in English just because it's the name of a faction in StarCraft?
The article title is "Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important terrestrial carbon sink", which is over the 80-character limit for titles. The submitter likely made the edit to make the title fit.
If you have better alternative, feel free to suggest one.
Edit to add: the best way to get a title fixed is to (quietly) email the mods using the contact link in the footer.
I wonder if, instead of scrubbing CO2, it would make sense to increase the other constituents of air, e.g. oxygen, thereby reducing the effective concentration of CO2. What if we ran a giant hydrolysis operation, generating O2 (and letting H2 escape into space or finding some other use for it other than burning it)?
This doesn't work. First of all, you'd still have the same mass of CO2, so the insulating effect wouldn't change. Those molecules would still be there to interfere with infrared radiation trying to escape into space.
Second of all, you're talking about gargantuan quantities of oxygen (or nitrogen, or whatever). CO2 is roughly 1/2500 of the atmosphere, so to achieve a given amount of dilution, you can remove one CO2 molecule or add 2500 other molecules.
Finally, I don't know what the side effects of increasing global air pressure would be, but I'm sure there would be significant effects!
Just adding an incredibly larger amount of gases (the atmosphere is 5.5 * 10^18 kg) in the air doesn't increase global air pressure, it will just make more gases leak into the outer atmosphere over time. I am not sure how long that would take though.
Anyway, as you said, any project that doesn't involve significantly scaling down anthropic GHG emissions and human settlement footprint will have significant effects. Planting trillions of trees will result in dead trees and environments destroyed. CCS at scale will involve ungodly amounts of energy + materials. Algae farming will alter the ocean's biodiversity already affected by warming + acidity + overfishing.
It's time to acknowledge that the Earth doesn't owe us a couple of large cars per household, exotic foods, meat BBQs and regular plane trips.
Air pressure, a few details aside, must be equal to the weight of the air molecules sitting above the spot where you are measuring it. If we add more gas to the atmosphere, sea level air pressure must increase. One way to think about it: the weight of the additional gas smooches down on the existing atmosphere, compressing it and thus increasing the pressure.
Of course all of this is academic in any event; addressing climate change by diluting the CO2 is a nice attempt at out-of-the-box thinking but it's not actually plausible.
Assuming you could make a sizable contribution, extra gas would eventually dissipate into space. That said, oxygen is high in potential chemical energy (usually contributes energy to a reaction, hence everything oxidizes), while CO2 is low (doesn’t react with much without external energy like sunlight). This the process of making oxygen or using (storing) CO2 are roughly equivalent energy wise. Of course processes and catalyst may change the exact numbers, but you aren’t getting around the basic thermo problem.
The paper claims the opposite, instead of a collapse of phytoplakton there will (likely) be an increase:
> Our study indicates that positive summer temperatures and a sufficient nutrient supply are key factors determining the present-day distribution of green snow algae on the Antarctic Peninsula. With the IPCC’s projected 1.5 °C global temperature increase, it is predicted that the 0 °C isotherm will increase in elevation and that positive degree days will become more commonplace and occur further to the south. This will likely open up new snow for colonisation by green snow algae, should an appropriate dispersal mechanism allow transfer to new areas. [...]
> A warming Peninsula, therefore, may see a shift towards fewer, larger snow algae blooms, resulting in a significant increase in biomass on larger outlying islands and the mainland. The coupled loss of blooms from smaller islands would be insignificant with respect to biomass and may be mitigated by southward range expansion or an earlier growth season. However, with multiple and often unknown species recorded within patches of green snow algae, and little known about the dispersal mechanisms, life cycles and plasticity of snow algal species, losses from these islands could represent a reduction of terrestrial diversity for the Antarctic Peninsula.
Ridiculous. Humans burning fossil fuel for 200 years is nothing compared to the mass extinctions that have occurred in the past, and yet the atmosphere is still here.
