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The basic gist of the article is found about 1/2 way in: "First, the phytoplankton in the oceans also photosynthesise [...] Therefore in terms of TOTAL global

The basic gist of the article is found about 1/2 way in: "First, the phytoplankton in the oceans also photosynthesise [...] Therefore in terms of TOTAL global photosynthesis, photosynthesis in the Amazon contributes around 9%. [...] Second, a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces." This reminds me, as we should all be reminded on a regular basis, the bulk of the things you read in the popular press are at best skimming the surface and at worst outright misleading due to grabbing onto one obscuring factoid instead of the most important pieces of information. Per Gell-Mann, I only see this in tech and science reporting, but that makes me really unreasonably suspicious of political reporting, too.

amelius 7y ago
> a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces. Especially when on fire ...
molteanu 7y ago
This is just another political play to oust Bolsonaro, the Brazil's president, from power. There have already been EU voices pushing for sanctions against Brazil and the Amazon fires are on the G7 agenda which brings a lot of negative press against the political body in Brazil. All the while central Africa is also ravaged by fires but you don't hear that in the news. Like most of what you hear in the big press, it comes with an agenda. It's not the case that a 'zero' was mispelled or enough info was not available, thus the erroneous reporting. You won't win the argument that way. The piece simply has another purpose from the one it is claiming to have, in this case, that future generations will say that the fires wiped out the entire human civilization in all it's glory at the hand of the Brazilian president. Ergo, he has to go until it's not too late.
- dev_dull 7y ago
  You’re being downvoted, but it clearly is a political move. The fires aren’t even outside of the average and already countries are applying political pressure on the president. When the facts are detached from the narrative, it’s usually a political story.
  - Bjartr 7y ago
    I heard the fires were up by 87% from last year, no matter the base rate, nearly double seems to qualify as "outside the average"
    - alacombe 7y ago
      Not according to NASA... https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-brazil https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-bra...
      - skosch 7y ago
        That article is from over a week ago, and it cites http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon, which has since been updated. Indeed, people are burning more this year than they did in the past few years – any burning at all has always been unacceptable, but if the current spike is what it takes to finally create some international outrage and put pressure on Bolsonaro, then I'll gladly take it.
        gus_massa 7y ago
        > any burning at all has always been unacceptable It's a traditional farming practice that has been used all over the word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn The idea is that you can burn a small place, cultivate it for a few years and then abandon it so the natural grow of the forest regenerate it. And some years later repeat the cicle. When the population is small it's fine because the time between burn and burn was enough for the soil and forest to recover. When the population increase the time gets too small and the forest has not enough tome to recover, and after a few cicles you have problems like reduction of fertility, erosion and desertification.
  - skosch 7y ago
    False. The 2019 fires are way outside of the average: http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html Also, what you call average is only the average over the past few years, which means: illegal loggers and ranchers burning the forest on purpose. The true long-term average is a healthy forest with very few fires.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- meerita 7y ago
  You're being downvoted and I also know why because it's 100% political. It's amazing that HN people downvote this and don't attach to the current evidence (the NASA report) which is 100% clear the fires aren't a new thing and there's no killing amazonia conspiracy from Bolsonaro.
ctrl-j 7y ago
I mean.. I get your point.. but 9% is still a lot, and even if it's net-zero, the carbon sequestration going into that process can't be negligible. It may be a click-bait factoid, but it's not like that factoid isn't an important one.
- Misdicorl 7y ago
  There is no active sequestration for a static forest. Only if the forest is expanding in size will sequestration occur. Obviously reducing the size via burning has the opposite effect
  - cm2187 7y ago
    But doesn't it regrow from the hashes?
    - Misdicorl 7y ago
      Eventually. See my other comment
    - marvin 7y ago
      From the ashes? Not if it's turned into a ranch! And I'm not qualified to answer what happens when you burn down an entire millenia-old ecosystem. Seems plausible that it might not go straight back to its old self in a human-relevant timeframe.
      - cm2187 7y ago
        Well my question is rather if it becomes a growing forest again, ie capturing co2.
      - didbsivdf 7y ago
        “Not if it's turned into a ranch!” That’s not obvious to me. Most plants are C2 plants, but grass is a C4 so it captures sunlight more efficiently. Not to say burning the Amazon isn’t a terrible idea.
bad_user 7y ago
Netflix has a pretty cool series called "One Strange Rock". You should watch it, they explain the Amazon's role well in one episode. First of all oxygen is constant. Oxygen is currently not the problem. And it's a good thing that it's constant because we don't want more of it either. The problem with Amazon is that on Earth it's all interconnected and while there's plenty of room for failure, there is a tipping point, scientists have only disagreed on where that tipping point is. Once we are there however we will no longer be able to stop the chain reaction.
- Retric 7y ago
  There is no single tipping point. There are a vast number of different tipping points with different outcomes.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Which is to say, there is no tipping point?
    - Retric 7y ago
      More that many systems are involved, and they are not all binary choices. So, local flooding for example does not operate on the same scale as ocean acidification.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    There is this idea that the ecological balance is very fragile and easily destroyed. This is true, in a way, but it doesn't mean nature will dies. It almost always just means that nature will find a new ecological balance.
    - bad_user 7y ago
      If nature finds a new ecological balance that's incompatible with human life, does it matter?
majos 7y ago
I don't quite get the claim behind the Gell-Mann effect. It assumes that because journalism about physics is inaccurate and oversimplified, journalism about everything else is too. But why should this be? Physics, and similar hard sciences, are deep and complex fields. There's plenty of math, jargon, and a long literature. Of course inaccurate simplifications happen when writing about it for a popular audience. Add in the weird incentives of mass media and the lack of scientific expertise among most journalists, and it makes sense that popular physics news is not so accurate. In contrast, other newspaper topics like politics, sports, business, etc. are often literal reporting of what people do. I'm not saying any of these areas is necessarily simple, but they are at the root level about human actors, not abstract quantities that most people have 0 intuition for. So I expect that it's actually easier to do good reporting on those topics.
- liability 7y ago
  > In contrast, other newspaper topics like politics, sports, business, etc. are often literal reporting of what people do. I was once in a local paper for my participation in a sports team. Well, my picture was. The name given to me in the article and caption was fabricated. Such a name didn't even belong to anybody else in my school, let alone on the same team! I assume the 'reporter' was too drunk to remember my name and too embarassed to ask somebody, so he just made one up.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    That is extremely unusual since besides generally require release forms from people in the pictures they run.
    - Monroe13 7y ago
      In the US at least, no release form is required of those pictured in a news article.
      - gamblor956 7y ago
mycall 7y ago
O2/CO2 aside, the Amazon rainforest's biodiversity is unique and has been a source for medical resource. There is more at stake than just breathing.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  I hear this brought up a lot. Can you name a drug that has actually passed all the safety and efficacy trials that has been developed from something in the Amazon?
  - ramphastidae 7y ago
    Quinine for one. There are many more if you are willing to do five minutes of research: https://www.conservation.org/blog/5-rainforest-species-that-could-save-your-life https://www.conservation.org/blog/5-rainforest-species-that-...
    - darkerside 7y ago
      It's 5 minutes of research if you know what you're looking for. It can be much more if you don't, and you don't know when and where to stop. BTW, that's kind of the entire point of a site like HN. Experts from different fields (and hobbyists and laypersons) get together and exchange knowledge. Sorry to go on about this, but I've been seeing too many responses saying to go Google things.
      - mehrdadn 7y ago
        > It's 5 minutes of research if you know what you're looking for. It can be much more if you don't, and you don't know when and where to stop. I know nothing about the topic, but literally just Googled Drugs from the Amazon [1], and the very first example of the very first search result I came across was Quinine. [2] [1] https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=drugs+from+the+amazon https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=drugs+from+the+ama... [2] https://www.adventure-life.com/amazon/articles/medicinal-treasures-of-the-rainforest https://www.adventure-life.com/amazon/articles/medicinal-tre...
ngold 7y ago
So yes or no does the amazon provide 20% or not?
- shkkmo 7y ago
  TLDR: The amazon produces 9% and consumes 9%. We have ~500x more oxygen than CO2 so any disparities will be seen in global CO2 levels WAY before global O2 levels.
badrabbit 7y ago
"...consumes about as much oxygen as it produces." If it burns,there will be leftover life that will no longer be supported by the amazon. Causing a significant increase in net Oxygen consumption. 1% uncomoemsated consumption doesn't sound like much but it will remain that way or worse whic means total O2 will continue to deplete.
- empath75 7y ago
  Not for very long.
  - mrpopo 7y ago
    They burn the amazon to leave way for cattle. The abounding biodiversity there will be replaced by cows for mass consumption. His point holds.
strainer 7y ago
The blogged claim that Amazon "consumes about as much oxygen as it produces" is not sourced and the piece seems to fly in the face of professional work on the subject. eg: "The global oxygen budget and its future projection" [1] > Fig. 4 summarizes the annual averaged global O2 budget from year 1990 to 2005, with the mass of O2 in gigatonnes (Gt) listed in each sink and for each process mentioned above (see Section 2.5). The inputs of O2 to the atmosphere by land and outgassing from oceans are quantified as 16.01 and 1.74 Gt/a, respectively. .... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209592731830375X#f0020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209592731...
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Let's demystify how plants "produce oxygen". They do it by splitting CO₂ molecules. The oxygen part (O₂) goes into the air, and the carbon (C) part becomes the plant. So for the Amazon to continually produce surplus oxygen to the atmosphere, it must also continually produce an ever expanding amount of plant material ("wood") that would form an ever growing pile there. This is not happening. Because forests don't produce surplus oxygen. Our atmosphere doesn't work that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis
  - EB66 7y ago
    > This is not happening. Because forests don't produce surplus oxygen. Our atmosphere doesn't work that way. This is just plain wrong. The blogger is completely wrong on this point as well. In normal atmosphere conditions, photosynthesis does result in net oxygen gain. Plants do require oxygen for respiration, but they require far less oxygen than what they produce during photosynthesis. Furthermore, at night when there's no light, plants do absorb oxygen and give off carbon dioxide in order to continue respiration -- but the amount of oxygen given off during the day is typically ten times greater than the quantity of oxygen consumed at night. > This reminds me, as we should all be reminded on a regular basis, the bulk of the things you read in the popular press are at best skimming the surface and at worst outright misleading due to grabbing onto one obscuring factoid instead of the most important pieces of information. Similarly, we should all be reminded that when skimming blogs and comments you're likely to come across misleading and inaccurate content. Scientifically inaccurate content like this gets posted on HN and blindly upvoted all the time.
smadge 7y ago
I think the charitable interpretation of the use of the “20% of the earths oxygen” statistic (as the article states this is probably more like 9% of earths photosynthesis) is not about an imagined fear of oxygen depletion, but drawing attention to how massive and important an ecosystem the Amazon is.
- luckylion 7y ago
  That's likely, but we could pretend it's 80% with the same reasoning - and it has an even larger effect with regard to drawing attention to the importance.
  - smadge 7y ago
    I am not excusing the statistic. I think people should be accurate. To me the correct statistic is just as compellingly.
wodenokoto 7y ago
Consumes as much as it produces ... does that mean the animal life in the amazon consumes all the O2 produces by the plants, or does it mean that the life-cycle of any one tree consumes as much O2 when decomposing, as it produces during its time photosynthesizing? If it is the latter, then we will see decreased oxygen levels as the forest decreases is size.
Merovius 7y ago
> This reminds me, as we should all be reminded on a regular basis, the bulk of the things you read in the popular press are at best skimming the surface and at worst outright misleading due to grabbing onto one obscuring factoid instead of the most important pieces of information FTR, this article is doing exactly that. Like, they a) divert your attention with the CO₂<->O₂ conversion (which doesn't change relative numbers in percentages of photosynthesis at all - you multiply both sides of the equation). And b) then proceeds to pretend that the Amazon eats up most of the Oxygen it produces, but the rest of the world apparently doesn't. Like, if a tree re-metabolizes 40% of the O₂ it produces, then that's also true for the 91% of O₂ produced outside the Amazon, so we still end up with the same 9% figure of all O₂ produced in the Amazon. The article ends with the "CO₂ emission is more important". Which, again, fair. But Photosynthesis is presumably a pretty important mechanism by which CO₂ is removed from the air. So a reduction of O₂ production is equivalent to a reduction of CO₂ absorption (though you have to multiply with 2.67, don't forget!), which seems to… be a bad thing for CO₂ concentration in the air. The gist of the article is pretty much "if you don't round and take into account maritime photosynthesis, the Amazon only produces 9% of all O₂". Which is fair. The rest is noise. It doesn't add to the argument and is just fueling the "MSM is bad!" cries…
- jefftk 7y ago
  The article is making a much stronger claim: > the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world's oxygen is effectively zero If this is correct, then the entire Amazon could vanish without having any effect on CO₂ levels.
  - chewbacha 7y ago
    It could be correct and still have an impact on CO2 levels as it is still a massive sequester of carbon. Burning it down removes the sequester and adds it to the atmosphere. Also, just because it doesn’t produce the breathable O2 we need, that doesn’t mean it’s not part of a global system that produces and stabilizes our atmosphere. It actually is responsible for a massive silt run off that feeds the oceanic diatoms that in turn produce half of the worlds breathable O2 and fixes carbon right in the ocean. This is a case where a literal point is incorrect but it does not decrease the importance of the rainforest to our globe.
MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> Second, a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces." Does this mean that if the Amazon rainforest fell off of the map tomorrow, life as we know it would pretty much stay the same/be ok?

amelius 7y ago

> a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces. Especially when on fire ...

molteanu 7y ago

This is just another political play to oust Bolsonaro, the Brazil's president, from power. There have already been EU voices pushing for sanctions against Brazil and the Amazon fires are on the G7 agenda which brings a lot of negative press against the political body in Brazil. All the while central Africa is also ravaged by fires but you don't hear that in the news. Like most of what you hear in the big press, it comes with an agenda. It's not the case that a 'zero' was mispelled or enough info was not available, thus the erroneous reporting. You won't win the argument that way. The piece simply has another purpose from the one it is claiming to have, in this case, that future generations will say that the fires wiped out the entire human civilization in all it's glory at the hand of the Brazilian president. Ergo, he has to go until it's not too late.

dev_dull 7y ago
You’re being downvoted, but it clearly is a political move. The fires aren’t even outside of the average and already countries are applying political pressure on the president. When the facts are detached from the narrative, it’s usually a political story.
- Bjartr 7y ago
  I heard the fires were up by 87% from last year, no matter the base rate, nearly double seems to qualify as "outside the average"
  - alacombe 7y ago
    Not according to NASA... https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-brazil https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-bra...
    - skosch 7y ago
      That article is from over a week ago, and it cites http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon, which has since been updated. Indeed, people are burning more this year than they did in the past few years – any burning at all has always been unacceptable, but if the current spike is what it takes to finally create some international outrage and put pressure on Bolsonaro, then I'll gladly take it.
      - gus_massa 7y ago
        > any burning at all has always been unacceptable It's a traditional farming practice that has been used all over the word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn The idea is that you can burn a small place, cultivate it for a few years and then abandon it so the natural grow of the forest regenerate it. And some years later repeat the cicle. When the population is small it's fine because the time between burn and burn was enough for the soil and forest to recover. When the population increase the time gets too small and the forest has not enough tome to recover, and after a few cicles you have problems like reduction of fertility, erosion and desertification.
- skosch 7y ago
  False. The 2019 fires are way outside of the average: http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html Also, what you call average is only the average over the past few years, which means: illegal loggers and ranchers burning the forest on purpose. The true long-term average is a healthy forest with very few fires.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
meerita 7y ago
You're being downvoted and I also know why because it's 100% political. It's amazing that HN people downvote this and don't attach to the current evidence (the NASA report) which is 100% clear the fires aren't a new thing and there's no killing amazonia conspiracy from Bolsonaro.

ctrl-j 7y ago

I mean.. I get your point.. but 9% is still a lot, and even if it's net-zero, the carbon sequestration going into that process can't be negligible. It may be a click-bait factoid, but it's not like that factoid isn't an important one.

Misdicorl 7y ago
There is no active sequestration for a static forest. Only if the forest is expanding in size will sequestration occur. Obviously reducing the size via burning has the opposite effect
- cm2187 7y ago
  But doesn't it regrow from the hashes?
  - Misdicorl 7y ago
    Eventually. See my other comment
  - marvin 7y ago
    From the ashes? Not if it's turned into a ranch! And I'm not qualified to answer what happens when you burn down an entire millenia-old ecosystem. Seems plausible that it might not go straight back to its old self in a human-relevant timeframe.
    - cm2187 7y ago
      Well my question is rather if it becomes a growing forest again, ie capturing co2.
    - didbsivdf 7y ago
      “Not if it's turned into a ranch!” That’s not obvious to me. Most plants are C2 plants, but grass is a C4 so it captures sunlight more efficiently. Not to say burning the Amazon isn’t a terrible idea.

bad_user 7y ago

Netflix has a pretty cool series called "One Strange Rock". You should watch it, they explain the Amazon's role well in one episode. First of all oxygen is constant. Oxygen is currently not the problem. And it's a good thing that it's constant because we don't want more of it either. The problem with Amazon is that on Earth it's all interconnected and while there's plenty of room for failure, there is a tipping point, scientists have only disagreed on where that tipping point is. Once we are there however we will no longer be able to stop the chain reaction.

Retric 7y ago
There is no single tipping point. There are a vast number of different tipping points with different outcomes.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Which is to say, there is no tipping point?
  - Retric 7y ago
    More that many systems are involved, and they are not all binary choices. So, local flooding for example does not operate on the same scale as ocean acidification.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  There is this idea that the ecological balance is very fragile and easily destroyed. This is true, in a way, but it doesn't mean nature will dies. It almost always just means that nature will find a new ecological balance.
  - bad_user 7y ago
    If nature finds a new ecological balance that's incompatible with human life, does it matter?

majos 7y ago

I don't quite get the claim behind the Gell-Mann effect. It assumes that because journalism about physics is inaccurate and oversimplified, journalism about everything else is too. But why should this be? Physics, and similar hard sciences, are deep and complex fields. There's plenty of math, jargon, and a long literature. Of course inaccurate simplifications happen when writing about it for a popular audience. Add in the weird incentives of mass media and the lack of scientific expertise among most journalists, and it makes sense that popular physics news is not so accurate. In contrast, other newspaper topics like politics, sports, business, etc. are often literal reporting of what people do. I'm not saying any of these areas is necessarily simple, but they are at the root level about human actors, not abstract quantities that most people have 0 intuition for. So I expect that it's actually easier to do good reporting on those topics.

liability 7y ago
> In contrast, other newspaper topics like politics, sports, business, etc. are often literal reporting of what people do. I was once in a local paper for my participation in a sports team. Well, my picture was. The name given to me in the article and caption was fabricated. Such a name didn't even belong to anybody else in my school, let alone on the same team! I assume the 'reporter' was too drunk to remember my name and too embarassed to ask somebody, so he just made one up.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  That is extremely unusual since besides generally require release forms from people in the pictures they run.
  - Monroe13 7y ago
    In the US at least, no release form is required of those pictured in a news article.
    - gamblor956 7y ago

mycall 7y ago

O2/CO2 aside, the Amazon rainforest's biodiversity is unique and has been a source for medical resource. There is more at stake than just breathing.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
I hear this brought up a lot. Can you name a drug that has actually passed all the safety and efficacy trials that has been developed from something in the Amazon?
- ramphastidae 7y ago
  Quinine for one. There are many more if you are willing to do five minutes of research: https://www.conservation.org/blog/5-rainforest-species-that-could-save-your-life https://www.conservation.org/blog/5-rainforest-species-that-...
  - darkerside 7y ago
    It's 5 minutes of research if you know what you're looking for. It can be much more if you don't, and you don't know when and where to stop. BTW, that's kind of the entire point of a site like HN. Experts from different fields (and hobbyists and laypersons) get together and exchange knowledge. Sorry to go on about this, but I've been seeing too many responses saying to go Google things.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      > It's 5 minutes of research if you know what you're looking for. It can be much more if you don't, and you don't know when and where to stop. I know nothing about the topic, but literally just Googled Drugs from the Amazon [1], and the very first example of the very first search result I came across was Quinine. [2] [1] https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=drugs+from+the+amazon https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=drugs+from+the+ama... [2] https://www.adventure-life.com/amazon/articles/medicinal-treasures-of-the-rainforest https://www.adventure-life.com/amazon/articles/medicinal-tre...

ngold 7y ago

So yes or no does the amazon provide 20% or not?

shkkmo 7y ago
TLDR: The amazon produces 9% and consumes 9%. We have ~500x more oxygen than CO2 so any disparities will be seen in global CO2 levels WAY before global O2 levels.

badrabbit 7y ago

"...consumes about as much oxygen as it produces." If it burns,there will be leftover life that will no longer be supported by the amazon. Causing a significant increase in net Oxygen consumption. 1% uncomoemsated consumption doesn't sound like much but it will remain that way or worse whic means total O2 will continue to deplete.

empath75 7y ago
Not for very long.
- mrpopo 7y ago
  They burn the amazon to leave way for cattle. The abounding biodiversity there will be replaced by cows for mass consumption. His point holds.

strainer 7y ago

The blogged claim that Amazon "consumes about as much oxygen as it produces" is not sourced and the piece seems to fly in the face of professional work on the subject. eg: "The global oxygen budget and its future projection" [1] > Fig. 4 summarizes the annual averaged global O2 budget from year 1990 to 2005, with the mass of O2 in gigatonnes (Gt) listed in each sink and for each process mentioned above (see Section 2.5). The inputs of O2 to the atmosphere by land and outgassing from oceans are quantified as 16.01 and 1.74 Gt/a, respectively. .... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209592731830375X#f0020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209592731...

BurningFrog 7y ago
Let's demystify how plants "produce oxygen". They do it by splitting CO₂ molecules. The oxygen part (O₂) goes into the air, and the carbon (C) part becomes the plant. So for the Amazon to continually produce surplus oxygen to the atmosphere, it must also continually produce an ever expanding amount of plant material ("wood") that would form an ever growing pile there. This is not happening. Because forests don't produce surplus oxygen. Our atmosphere doesn't work that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis
- EB66 7y ago
  > This is not happening. Because forests don't produce surplus oxygen. Our atmosphere doesn't work that way. This is just plain wrong. The blogger is completely wrong on this point as well. In normal atmosphere conditions, photosynthesis does result in net oxygen gain. Plants do require oxygen for respiration, but they require far less oxygen than what they produce during photosynthesis. Furthermore, at night when there's no light, plants do absorb oxygen and give off carbon dioxide in order to continue respiration -- but the amount of oxygen given off during the day is typically ten times greater than the quantity of oxygen consumed at night. > This reminds me, as we should all be reminded on a regular basis, the bulk of the things you read in the popular press are at best skimming the surface and at worst outright misleading due to grabbing onto one obscuring factoid instead of the most important pieces of information. Similarly, we should all be reminded that when skimming blogs and comments you're likely to come across misleading and inaccurate content. Scientifically inaccurate content like this gets posted on HN and blindly upvoted all the time.

smadge 7y ago

I think the charitable interpretation of the use of the “20% of the earths oxygen” statistic (as the article states this is probably more like 9% of earths photosynthesis) is not about an imagined fear of oxygen depletion, but drawing attention to how massive and important an ecosystem the Amazon is.

luckylion 7y ago
That's likely, but we could pretend it's 80% with the same reasoning - and it has an even larger effect with regard to drawing attention to the importance.
- smadge 7y ago
  I am not excusing the statistic. I think people should be accurate. To me the correct statistic is just as compellingly.

wodenokoto 7y ago

Consumes as much as it produces ... does that mean the animal life in the amazon consumes all the O2 produces by the plants, or does it mean that the life-cycle of any one tree consumes as much O2 when decomposing, as it produces during its time photosynthesizing? If it is the latter, then we will see decreased oxygen levels as the forest decreases is size.

Merovius 7y ago

> This reminds me, as we should all be reminded on a regular basis, the bulk of the things you read in the popular press are at best skimming the surface and at worst outright misleading due to grabbing onto one obscuring factoid instead of the most important pieces of information FTR, this article is doing exactly that. Like, they a) divert your attention with the CO₂<->O₂ conversion (which doesn't change relative numbers in percentages of photosynthesis at all - you multiply both sides of the equation). And b) then proceeds to pretend that the Amazon eats up most of the Oxygen it produces, but the rest of the world apparently doesn't. Like, if a tree re-metabolizes 40% of the O₂ it produces, then that's also true for the 91% of O₂ produced outside the Amazon, so we still end up with the same 9% figure of all O₂ produced in the Amazon. The article ends with the "CO₂ emission is more important". Which, again, fair. But Photosynthesis is presumably a pretty important mechanism by which CO₂ is removed from the air. So a reduction of O₂ production is equivalent to a reduction of CO₂ absorption (though you have to multiply with 2.67, don't forget!), which seems to… be a bad thing for CO₂ concentration in the air. The gist of the article is pretty much "if you don't round and take into account maritime photosynthesis, the Amazon only produces 9% of all O₂". Which is fair. The rest is noise. It doesn't add to the argument and is just fueling the "MSM is bad!" cries…

jefftk 7y ago
The article is making a much stronger claim: > the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world's oxygen is effectively zero If this is correct, then the entire Amazon could vanish without having any effect on CO₂ levels.
- chewbacha 7y ago
  It could be correct and still have an impact on CO2 levels as it is still a massive sequester of carbon. Burning it down removes the sequester and adds it to the atmosphere. Also, just because it doesn’t produce the breathable O2 we need, that doesn’t mean it’s not part of a global system that produces and stabilizes our atmosphere. It actually is responsible for a massive silt run off that feeds the oceanic diatoms that in turn produce half of the worlds breathable O2 and fixes carbon right in the ocean. This is a case where a literal point is incorrect but it does not decrease the importance of the rainforest to our globe.

MuffinFlavored 7y ago

> Second, a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces." Does this mean that if the Amazon rainforest fell off of the map tomorrow, life as we know it would pretty much stay the same/be ok?