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As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future
- thriftwy 3y agoHow is that solar shade coming along?[10]
- hyperbovine 3y agoA solar shade would merely vault acidification ahead of anoxification on the shitlist of horrible things we're doing to our oceans.
- Apofis 3y agoAside from Ocean Acidification, uncontrollable Algae Blooms, and Melting Sea Ice, we now have Ocean Deoxygenation on our plates. We also have unprecedented droughts on land as well. Humans really will be the next mass extinction event on this planet. So incredibly selfish.
- throwanem 3y ago"Will be?" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoAcidification is the unavailability to carry hydrogen molecules. The primary hydrogen carrier in water is oxygen. Are deoxygenation & acidification different problem, or different slants on the same problem?
- rolph 3y agodeoxygenation, and acidification are two different phenomenon, they may influence each other but are not obligated. im very much inclined to say these are not problems. these are symptoms of a larger scale problem, namely an atmosphere pushing thermal bounds beyond global buffering capacity, and CO2 accumulating beyond biospheric buffering ,and regulation.
- myshpa 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot
- titzer 3y agoYou forgot microplastics.
- johndevor 3y agoJust unlock gen 4 nuclear.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoI don't think there has ever been a time in all of human history with so many existential threats. Between catastrophic climate change and resource depletion, AI, the danger of nuclear war, COVID and other potential pandemics, economic insecurity for most of the population, and farmed irrational extremist political movements, we seem to have quite a lot to deal with. Might as well just have Carrington Event 2.0 and be done with it.
- pirate787 3y agoActually, the world has never had greater economic security than it does in 2023.
- minsight 3y agoHope you can eat that.
- thfuran 3y agoWell, you sure as hell can't eat economic insecurity.
- harry8 3y agoOk this conversation can get pretty silly, let's try to avoid that. Now at 2023 we have lifted more people out of poverty and ill-health in both raw numbers and as a percentage of the population than any time in the planet's history. Without prescribing anything in so far as dealing with the world's problems, be careful flippantly trading that off. It may not be you, your friends and your family that previously watched their children die and now don't but I don't see that as making this quite frankly stunning achievement as an irrelevance. https://www.gapminder.org/fw/world-health-chart/ https://www.gapminder.org/fw/world-health-chart/
- actionfromafar 3y agoWhen the oil is running out, how will you make the fertiliser?
- brutusborn 3y agoI don’t think any of these are really that critical: they will become a problem in a few centuries if we do absolutely nothing but will likely be fine. Take ocean deoxygenation: it happens locally due to fertiliser runoff in places that have a history of low oxygen. It’s good to put some resources towards fixing this, but it’s not useful to think of it as an extinction level problem that we “now have.”
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoWow, you have the entirety of the world ecosystem, from deep ocean currents and biology, to the entire 70% of the world's surface oceans, to the jungle rainforests, arctic/antarctic ice, atmospheric changes, solar radiation variation, historical records, 100% accurate computer simulations/predictors, all nailed down? All the interaction of species, effects of (mass) extinctions? Invasive species? Habitat destruction, soil loss from farming, AND you can predict the impacts of human industry, economics, and technology change? You have ALL THAT NAILED DOWN, internet expert? Forgive me if I don't take your assurances about that as being "no big deal" with any iota of reliability. There are literally 20 major scientific domains that all are in lockstep agreement about anthropogenic global warming, from geologists, atmospheric scientists, basic chemistry and physics, oceanographers, biologists, archaeologists, historians. A massive collection of scientific inquiry that basically all ends at the same conclusions. It's quite literally thousands of PhDs, maybe tens of thousands. Of course, all of them don't know as much as you, internet guy.
- brutusborn 3y agoYeah I’ve read a lot actually, which is why I’ve changed my mind about the severity of these problems. Most predictions are just conjecture with no real link to good models. I’m always happy to read more papers if you know of any good ones. All the ones I’ve read on low ocean oxygen have convinced me it isn’t a very critical problem. Just a few things you get wrong: thinking models are 100% accurate, thinking scientists have everything “nailed down” and assuming that I don’t know enough to back up my opinion.
- 3y ago
- beachy 3y agoAtmospheric CO2 has increased by a third just since I've been alive. It's difficult to overstate just how quickly we are destroying the planet. I spend a lot of time snorkeling and I tell my kids to really take in what they see because it probably won't be there when they're parents themselves.
- brutusborn 3y agoI think it’s good to encourage appreciation, but no need to exaggerate risks. IPCC predicts existential risks to marine ecosystems at temperatures much higher than today. Your child will probably be able to go snorkelling just fine as an adult. My local coral reefs have returned to health after a major bleeching event that was predicted to be the beginning of the end. Sometimes our catastrophic predictions are wrong, or exaggerated. https://www.aims.gov.au/reef-monitoring/gbr-condition-summary-2020-2021 https://www.aims.gov.au/reef-monitoring/gbr-condition-summar...
- yongjik 3y agoCollapsing marine ecosystems are not theoretical risks, they have been happening around the world for decades (if not more). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing#Examples_and_evidence_for_overfishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing#Examples_and_evide... Or did you mean "Don't worry, the impact of oxygen level change is exaggerated, because we'll make sure those fish are gone one way or other!"?
- brutusborn 3y agoYes, some fisheries are collapsing in places where they are not properly regulated. Meanwhile whale numbers are increasing, polar bear numbers are increasing and in my local fishery the fish population is increasing! Don’t take my comment as saying there are no problems, I’m merely pointing out that telling children “this probably won’t exist when you are an adult” isn’t particularly honest and I don’t think it’s very useful.
- 3y ago
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoWeird this was syndicated onto BBC also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236444
- sbierwagen 3y agoThey've been doing it for a while: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abbc.com+%22This+article+was+originally+published+by+Yale+e360%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abbc.com+%22This+artic...
- breakyerself 3y agoI tried to get newspapers to report on it and they kept telling me they already covered ocean acidification.
- moffkalast 3y agoIirc the research regarding what kind of emotion evoking news gets most attention shows it's mainly awe and anger. Sadness doesn't get you very far, so there's a direct incentive to not report on any collapse related stuff we can't really do anything about anymore, since it won't get shared at all. Could spin it as an angry piece condemning the fossil fuel lobby, but that probably gets you cut off the next time there's a burning oil rig to report on.
- mandmandam 3y ago> that probably gets you cut off the next time there's a burning oil rig to report on. More likely, the money from the expensive green-washing ads they buy is cut off. Anyway, I'm sick of profit motive being an excuse for media complicity in atrocity.
- NovaDudely 3y agoYou know how a lot of people see those in the past as being ignorant and we wonder how they could not see the silly things they did... the older I get, the more that is how I see nowadays. Folks will look back on us in decades/centuries from now and go "what were they thinking? They knew what was happening, knew what had to be done but then didn't do it". There are two books by William T Volleman, the Carbon Ideologies series. The first few pages are written to the people who would potentially read these books in 200 years trying to explain how the people of today are not much different than they are. It was a wise move to frame these things like that.
- moffkalast 3y agoI mean what, hindsight is 20/20? People have always been and will always be self-centred and short-sighted. Considering that, while having limited info plus strong preconceptions and it's not really surprising that most decisions ever made have been terrible.
- saagarjha 3y agoGood. They should tough it out and grow a pair—of lungs, that is. Living in an aquatic environment has made all the fish grow soft. Time to evolve like the rest of us did. (More seriously, warm ocean dead spots affect more than just fish: I suspect we’ll see a further decline in marine mammals too, for example.)
- jfghi 3y agoFree market solves it /s
- nine_zeros 3y ago[flagged]
- petre 3y agoActually some fish living in anoxic environments have adapted to breathing air. Betta fish and Corydoras come to mind.
- ChatGTP 3y agoLooks like we are the paper clip optimising narrow AI we’ve all been afraid of after all… We don’t make paper clips though, we’ve optimised to make money and turn everything into it. So ashamed to be part of of it,
- throwanem 3y agoMany science fiction authors have made surprisingly incisive contemporary critiques in the forms of allegory and metaphor. Bostrom is unusual mainly in that he doesn't seem to know when he is doing it.
- stevenwoo 3y agoAsimov’s The Gods Themselves description of economics reads sort of like Onion headlines of today but from fifty years ago.
- ASalazarMX 3y agoWe've optimized so hard we can make money out of negative money.
- aaron_m04 3y agoI'm starting to accept that we are done for. The only thing that gives me hope is that maybe some alien civilization out there in the universe successfully avoided this great filter.
- titzer 3y agoThe Earth seems to want to evolve towards a giant tropical rainforest and keeps getting smacked by one disaster after another. This time it's just an infestation of apes that will knock out some unknown chunk of life and probably gobble up and pave over half the surface before collapsing under its own weight.
- stevenwoo 3y agoSpeculative fiction of Lilith’a Brood by Octavia Butler comes to mind, it was good but so bleak I had to stop in second book.
- cwkoss 3y agoI think a (dis)info campaign touting the toxins and pollutants in fish could be a major environmental win. Humans have destroyed huge amounts of ocean life, and with fish populations already devastated, climate change is going to push many species over the brink to extinct. I feel like - even if requires pseudoscientific explanations or bald-faced lies - it would be a net good for the world if people thought there is a chance eating fish could kill them. Alarmism over heavy metal accumulation happening at increasing rates, fish absorbing pesticides and poisoning people, stuff like that. Idk if it's happening, but I feel like it would be good for the environment if people believed that. (disclaimer: i don't enjoy the flavor of fish anyways, so my cost-benefit of this is different than most peoples.)
- myshpa 3y agoNo disinformation campaigns are necessary. Fish do indeed often contain heavy metals (mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, copper), PCBs, dioxins, and furans, as well as microplastics. Young dolphins are dying because the mother's milk may be poisonous for the same reason. https://phys.org/news/2018-12-toxins-mother-young-european-dolphins.html https://phys.org/news/2018-12-toxins-mother-young-european-d... Banned toxins passed from mother to young in European dolphins https://www.poisoningchildren.com/blog/2014/02/05/bioaccumulation-and-dead-baby-dolphins https://www.poisoningchildren.com/blog/2014/02/05/bioaccumul... Bioaccumulation and Dead Baby Dolphins "Because female dolphins off-load most of their toxic exposure to their first-born calf, their levels after sexual maturity are lower than males; but a very high percentage of first-borns die" "It is not astonishing that native women in the Arctic Circle, who eat high levels of marine mammals, pass these chemicals on to their babies with dire effects" "Childbirth and breastfeeding are some of the few ways the body can rid itself of persistent chemicals. It is usually still best to breastfeed, but children who are breastfed continue to inherit the mother’s exposures, as shown in a study of testicular cancer in Denmark and Finland" Btw, human and cow milk has similar problems.
- cwkoss 3y agoAh, so just needs an awareness campaign! Even more of a clear moral win then if it doesn't require deception. (also, yikes and tragic)
- nashashmi 3y ago> The oxygen drop is driven by a few factors. First, the laws of physics dictate that warmer water can hold less dissolved gas than cooler water (this is why a warm soda is less fizzy than a cold one). > Melting ice adds fresh, less-dense water that resists downward mixing in key regions, and the high rate of atmospheric warming at the poles, as compared to the equator, also dampens winds that drive ocean currents. > Finally, bacteria living in the water, which feed off phytoplankton and other organic gunk as it falls to the seafloor, consume oxygen. This effect can be massive along coastlines, where fertilizer runoff feeds algae blooms, which in turn feed oxygen-gobbling bacteria
- NovaDudely 3y agoSo there is this idea that we can reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere by using iron seeding into the ocean causing a massive amount of phytoplankton production. But would the side effect of this be a drop in ocean oxygen levels?
- DoctorOetker 3y agoAs water heats, the solubility of solids (salts, sugars, etc.) goes up. As water heats, the solubility of gases (O2, CO2, etc.) goes down. Humanity coming from initial blissful ignorance about CO2 emissions eventually became concerned about rising atmospheric CO2. Most emitted CO2 was actually being absorbed by oceans. This also makes the ocean acidic. So the oceans acted like a "landfill" buffering a large amount of CO2 emissions. Consider a duplicate earth, where Carbon is added to atmospheric O2 oxygen molecules. As long as its surface waters are not saturated with CO2, it can buffer a large fraction of the resulting CO2, with an equilibrium constant between aqueous CO2 and atmospheric CO2. At a certain point this "CO2 landfill" or rather "CO2 seafill" saturates. Assuming for simplicity a constant CO2 emission rate, thus without increasing the rate of CO2 emission, atmospheric CO2 rises at an initial rate (slower than CO2 emission rate, since a large fraction is initially absorbed by the ocean surface waters); until surface waters are (near) saturation, at which point atmospheric CO2 starts rising at a much higher rate since the surface waters no longer absorb significant amounts of CO2. If one then desparately and miraculously succeeds in somehow halting continued excess CO2 emissions, the globe will still heat due to the added atmospheric CO2, also heating these surface waters, decreasing gaseous solubilities, resulting not just in aqueous O2 depletion but also sadly in "CO2 blowback": the large fraction of CO2 historically dissolved in the surface waters turns back into the atmosphere, even though miraculously excess antropogenic CO2 emissions were halted! From a "carbon credits" perspective, where players are traditionally viewed as nations and corporations, surface waters rear their head and releases the historical CO2 debth.
- swsdsailor 3y agoI am very interested in using tech to help the ocean. Does anyone have ideas for technical solutions to this?
- peteradio 3y agoIn the movie biodome they picked up all the cigarettes and made a kickass air filter. Presumably something like that might work.
- hedora 3y agoI think the best bet is to figure out how to get desalination plants to also scrub CO2 and lithium from seawater. With government subsidies, it might actually turn a profit, and we'll need to do all three of those things anyway. (Scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere would also work, but would take longer to address ocean acidification.)
- myshpa 3y agoWe would need an immense number of such factories. Just lookup how much is already in the atmosphere, and how much are those technologies able to capture. This is a feel-good technology, something to placate the population that something is being done. We have better factories. They're called trees.
- myshpa 3y agoYes. 1. stop overfishing by switching to plant based diets 2. stop fishing ... even fish we don't fish, but decimate (as bycatch) will rebound 3. stop fishing ... there won't be as much plastic to entangle fish, mammals and turtles (49% of great pacific garbage patch is fishing nets) 4. stop animal ag ... minimize agricultural runoff from farms and fields to stop creating dead zones in the ocean 5. stop animal ag ... use technology to reforest pastures and store all excessive carbon in them 6. reform agriculture ... use technology to improve ag methods and improve our soils, storing even more carbon in them 7. stop fossil fuels 8. give nature time to repair itself 9. enjoy healthy ecosystems, saved for future generations Or explain the scorched earth to your children.
- the_third_wave 3y agoHow did fish manage during the climatic optimum [1] some 8500 to 5500 years ago when it was between 1.5°C and 4°C warmer than it is now, let alone during the previous interglacial periods [2] which were markedly warmer than the Holocene (i.e. the current interglacial period)? If there was a marked reduction in ocean life due to reduced oxygen levels that should be visible in fossil records. If there was no such reduction then why would there be one now? Increased CO₂ has led to a markedly "greener" planet [3] - the increase was enough to cover the US twice in vegetation by 2016. Those plants produce oxygen during photosynthesis (6 CO₂ + 6 H₂O → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6 O₂) which is released to the environment (air or water) during daylight hours leading to a higher oxygen concentration. I suspect this balance between higher atmospheric CO₂ which leads to an increase in vegetation which then leads to an increase in oxygen production is what kept ocean life from succumbing due to oxygen deprivation during those periods when the average temperature was much higher than it is now. If this happened then, why would it not happen now? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation#/media/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_glaciation#/media/F... [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004
- thulle 3y ago> How did fish manage during the climatic optimum [1] some 8500 to 5500 years ago when it was between 1.5°C and 4°C warmer than it is now From your wikipedia link: ---8<--- A study in 2020 estimated that the average global temperature during the warmest 200 year period of the HCO, around 6,500 years ago, was around 0.7 °C warmer than the mean for nineteenth century AD. The HCO consisted of increases of up to 4 °C near the North Pole (in one study, winter warming of 3 to 9 °C and summer of 2 to 6 °C in northern central Siberia).[8] Northwestern Europe experienced warming, but there was cooling in Southern Europe.[9] The average temperature change appears to have declined rapidly with latitude and so essentially no change in mean temperature is reported at low and middle latitudes. ---8<--- So, the effect then was localized to the waters where there's more oxygen anyway, and having temperature going in different directions in different parts of Europe and at a much slower rate than current changes, would make it easier for the fish to migrate? Unclear how water temperatures behaved at different depths though.
- a2tech 3y agoMy friends who are fishery people (biologists) are all pretty sure we've doomed commercial fisheries in the ocean. It's too late to recover and no one really wants to fix the issues. Enjoy your seafood while you can because they think they'll be gone before our generation dies out.
- pirate787 3y agoThey are already growing fish meat in labs, hopefully that and farming will take some of the pressure off the wild fisheries.
- losteric 3y agoLab grown beef has sure had a major impact on clear-cut ranching
- ChrisClark 3y agoYeah, it turns out, things never get cheaper or created in greater quantities over time. No history of that ever happening.
- myshpa 3y agoSure ... but we still don't know how to grow that in big quantities. And scaling the production could take few decades. Plants do we have now, and properly cooked they're delicious ;)
- NovaDudely 3y agoThe single biggest issue with lab meat is the lack of an immune system. Once we crack that then there is a real chance of this stuff working out. That said until then, I will just avoid all meats. If I have those cravings, the alternatives we have now are reasonable enough to scratch that itch even if not the same.
- kuhewa 3y agoPerhaps your friends work in a region like the GOM where anoxic zones are a substantial and growing issue or regions where management remains poor so the sentiment would be accurate for their domain, but it isn't even close to holding true globally for all fish stocks, neither effects of low oxygen nor overharvesting etc. There were big improvements in stock assessment and fisheries management around 15-20 years ago and many formerly overfished stocks are on a positive trend since [1] [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1909726116 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1909726116
- ldehaan 3y ago[dead]
- markthien 3y ago[dead]
- pierat 3y ago> As ocean oxygen levels dip, fish face an uncertain future "An Uncertain future"? Seriously? The word you're looking for is "death". No sense in couching climate disaster in metaphorical soft words. There is going to be death, and a whole lot of death of all species, including humans.
- 000ooo000 3y agoThe shareholders believe alarmist language is best avoided
- gmerc 3y agoThis will do us in a handful of years. if you think there’s enough ship to push people migrating to places where they can still get protein back into the ocean or flimsy border fences will stop things, you’ll be in for a surprise.
- more_corn 3y agoWhat are the implications for phytoplankton?