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Amazon’s carbon uptake declines as trees die faster
- extinxt 12y agoOh well. We're screwed. It was nice while it lasted.
- nirmel 12y agoIs it possible to create a man-made process to convert carbon into oxygen? Do we need to rely on plants?
- ectopic_cheeto 12y agoMaybe a man-assisted process - like skyscraper-sized water gardens full of algae.
- themgt 12y agoIt requires energy - plants use photosynthesis to harness sunlight, and then use the carbon to build more of themselves, a great positive feedback loop. We have no current technology that has anywhere near the ability to be as net-carbon negative as a plant Now, if we had something like insanely-cheap fusion power, this would probably be a solvable problem. Otherwise I think some serious advances in nanotech would be required - you're talking about needing to pull 32.3 billion metric tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere per year just to offset our current emissions, much less pull the atmospheric ppm down from the dangerously high (and likely unstable) spot it's already at. tl;dr the problem isn't getting carbon out of the atmosphere, the problem is being net-carbon for the entire process lifecycle while doing it
- codecamper 12y agoI'm about 40. Do you realize that people have been heralding nanotechnology as the solution to all these problems since I was 17? Same goes for fusion. I remember reading in Scientific American that fusion was just a few years off. that was over 20 years ago.
- jessaustin 12y agoThey keep fusion in the news as marketing for the uneconomical nuclear fission power that we're actually forced to use. "Any day now, we won't be producing all this noxious waste!"
- Ygg2 12y agoI'm sorry, but what noxious waste? You mean coal, right?
- crpatino 12y agoHe meant the radioactive waste from nuclear fission (with an I) plants. If I picked up the argument correctly, fusion was never meant to work, it was just a smoke screen so that people would not look too closely at what the nuclear industry was actually doing. I don't share that opinion, though I think nuclear fusion power production - at least in the scales that would matter for the project of human civilization - turned out to be much more harder to achieve than what anyone had expected 50 years ago; and that some hard questions about the practical feasibility of that option went unasked for far too long. Out of normal human nature, of course. No need to cry conspiracy!
- Retric 12y agoWe have really dropped the ball on fusion research. JET the current best fusion reactor was built between 1978-1982 (Q ~= 0.7). So from 1982 to now there has been zero count it zero actual progress with a physical device. (They waited to 1991 to actually start using it for fusion not just plasma experiments and the record comes from 1997.) Arguably, if we had been building a new state of the art device every 5 years we would have had a working fusion reactor in the late 1990's. Though computer models suggested it would not be cost effective. PS: Yes, the world’s best fusion reactor was designed in 1977 and people wonder why progress is so slow. Hmm, I wonder.
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- jessriedel 12y ago
- codecamper 12y agoI remember reading that they figured out that photosynthesis' energy transport operates at the quantum level. whatever that means -- but I think that means that photosynthesis is way more complex than we can currently figure out.
- patrickdavey 12y agoYip, quite a good episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage also talked about it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b052hptj http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b052hptj "What is the point of plants"
- justizin 12y agoI'll defer to another commenter about the challenge of doing this without generating more carbon to generate the required power. Also, plants don't, "Convert Carbon into Oxygen", they separate the Oxygen from the Carbon and release it. FWIW the Ocean processes like 3-4x as much carbon as the rainforest. It is of concern that the rainforest is losing its' capacity to, but perhaps it has been overloaded as dead spots in the ocean expand. Sylvia Earle's project, "Mission Blue", is trying to help the ocean regenerate by fighting overfishing and other practices. There's a great film on Netflix by this name that includes a lot of dive footage from decades ago, and from present day.
- ars 12y ago> Also, plants don't, "Convert Carbon into Oxygen", they separate the Oxygen from the Carbon and release it. They don't do that either. They separate Oxygen from Carbon Dioxide which is not the same thing as carbon. Carbon pollution is soot - like from a diesel. The stuff they are talking about here is carbon dioxide.
- samatman 12y agoCarbon is converted into oxygen in the heart of stars. You presumably mean converting carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. Yes, we can do this. Plants are currently more energetically efficient at it, and they just grow, which is tough to beat.
- Gustomaximus 12y agoA man made process that uses nature. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
- imjk 12y agoOne more reason to hate Jeff Bezos! Amazon's doing nothing to stop global warming (I'm kidding of course).
- sp332 12y agoThey must be sequestering a lot of carbon in all those cardboard boxes :)
- codecamper 12y agodon't worry, i'm sure that we'll be able to just put it all back together again.
- jeff4e 12y agoalgae to the rescue!
- primroot 12y agohttp://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140804-harmful-algal-bloom-lake-erie-climate-change-science/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140804-harmf...
- yupyupyup1 12y agoIt's hard to see when there is so much money in the way.
- jkot 12y agoIs not amazon deforested to make place for biofuel plantations?
- rosser 12y agoActually, much of the land in Brazil that's being used for biofuels was previously deforested for logging and cattle. Of the remainder, yes, some of it is biofuels, but the vast majority is simply logging, with agriculture (both crops and livestock) a distant second.
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- jessaustin 12y agoIf a carbon-credit system ever gets off the ground, will Brazil have to buy credits from the USA with its steadily-growing forest cover?
- ForHackernews 12y agoSo we're pretty much f'ed, right? http://dark-mountain.net/ http://dark-mountain.net/
- chadzawistowski 12y agoThat's a very interesting website. Can you tell me more about it?
- ForHackernews 12y agoIt's a project started by a disillusioned environmentalist who believes that humanity is not going to make the changes necessary to save ourselves from environmental devastation: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/apr/29/environmentalism-dark-mountain-project http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/apr/29/environme...
- nazgulnarsil 12y agoEvery single doom and gloom "unsustainable" claim I have looked into to date has been bunk.
- zachrose 12y agoWald's unique insight was that the holes from flak and bullets on the bombers that did return represented the areas where they were able to take damage. The data showed that there were similar patches on each returning bomber where there was no damage from enemy fire, leading Wald to conclude that these patches were the weak spots that led to the loss of a plane if hit, and that must be reinforced. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald
- monort 12y agoI thought rainforest is carbon neutral. Every tree is oxidized back to carbon dioxide after death. How can it absorb more carbon, than release? What is the sink?
- rosser 12y agoYes, trees die and immediately sublimate. No, it turns out, decay is a long-term process, and much (most, even) of the carbon is taken up by the organisms that feed on that decay.
- monort 12y agoSo, what happens when that organisms die? Carbon should be stored somewhere without contact with oxygen, for forest to be carbon absorber.
- guard-of-terra 12y agoSwamps are good candidates for this (as opposed to forests)
- rosser 12y agoSo, what happens when that organisms die? Another organism feeds on its decay? Lather, rinse, repeat.
- landryraccoon 12y agoIf the rainforest increases in size, then carbon is removed from the atmosphere. If the rainforest decreases in size, it is released. As you pointed out, if the rainforest is the same constant size, it doesn't matter if a tree is oxidized after it dies - that means a new tree replaced it. The steady state is that the rainforest is a constant size. It is constantly absorbing and releasing carbon dioxide, but they must sum to zero if the size of the forest is constant.
- crpatino 12y agoA sink does not have to be an "ultimate sink", you can think of it as a temporary storage subsystem. Individual trees take carbon from the atmosphere, put it into their body mass, and release it years/decades later on their eventual death. As others have pointed out, a "steady state" forest would be carbon neutral. In any given year all the surviving trees add as much body mass as that of the fewer dying trees. However, steady state is usually not how things work out in practice. AFAIK, most years forest are carbon negative - slowly building up wood mass - and then there are specific events that make for big releases of carbon (big fires, blight that affects multiple trees, etc). Not sure if you can say that evens out to neutral in longer time frames. The problem in Brazil seems to be that illegal loggers are much more efficient than isolated release events for cutting down trees, so the normal tendency to sequester carbon is being overwhelmed. The "sink" in those terms gets turned into a "source". Not that new carbon atoms are getting created, but it's more like the buffer has now a tendency to grow smaller instead of bigger over time. btw. I don't understand why the down votes, so +1.
- ZenoArrow 12y agoYou know, we could stop this nonsense in less than a year if we wanted to. Do you know why we won't? Of course you do. You know the answers just as well as I do. Firstly, you have to understand the role of the human ego. Some people like playing the revolutionary role, but many people don't. People who want revolution think the answer is to get other people to take up their cause, to think like they think, become committed to a just world. Can you not see why it's ineffective? Can not see that all you end up doing is preaching to the converted? If you want an fast, effective environmental revolution, you downplay the rhetoric. You make it mundane. You make it so people can join in without needing to act or think in a set way. You stop trying to fix everything all at once and you focus your efforts on breaking down the problems systematically. As an example, think about how the conversations surrounding fossil fuel usage have evolved. At first the main argument was about global warming/climate change, how we must change to save the planet. It helped build awareness, debate, column inches in newspapers, etc... but the arguments were too easily swayed by climate change deniers, who could cherry pick various statistics in order to further their case. However, luckily we found a better argument... peak oil. Peak oil is a simple concept to explain. We're using crude oil at a much faster rate than it's being produced, and there will come a tipping point after which we will have no choice to use less oil, as it'll be harder to come by and more expensive. The concept is simple, it stands up logically, you don't need to follow the latest developments in order to appreciate its validity, all positive points. But the most positive point at all, there's no cultural baggage that comes along with it. There's no lifestyle expectations that come from taking it to heart. It's a less emotionally stimulating idea, and it's all the more effective for it. So let's look at this Amazon carbon capacity issue. Let's look at what works. Easy first focus, deforestation. People are cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest in order to make a living. So you focus on giving those people other options to make a living, options that take away the need to cut down rainforest trees. Is it as cathartic as shouting in the streets about saving the rainforest? No. Is it more effective? You know the answer.
- meric 12y agoThe world's environmental problems is ultimately a single over-consumption problem. We consume too much: * fossil fuels * trees * fish * food & fertiliser & antibiotics It'll be difficult to convince others to spend less. We're currently taxed on how much we extract the earth's resources for other's use. I think to solve the consumption problem this is the wrong way to go. It would align incentives more to tax consumption instead. This will better encourage people to not spend. Of course this goes against what the ECB and the Federal reserve's objective, to increase GDP and thus, consumption, reducing our forests, increasing our CO2 output, and destroying our fisheries. The world's capital and political system is aligned the wrong way around in creating a sustainable system to manage humankind's allocation of production and consumption. I think it will be too difficult to change the world, and the only thing I can do is to encourage my own frugality.
- EGreg 12y agoI am actually surprised that ecosystems on Earth somehow are in an equilibrium, with plants converting as much carbon back into oxygen as animals convert back, on a global scale. I mean, how does evolution explain that? We once had a near exinction for anaerobic bacteria, because of all the oxygen they produced, at least that's the theory. But the feedback mechanism is through such a global thing (amount of CO2 in the atmosphere) that it is a wonder to me how the populations don't just enter a tragedy of the commons.
- nitrogen 12y agoI don't think it's right to say that Earth is in "equilibrium"; it's always changing, with or without us (though it's changing faster with us). But the feedback mechanism is through such a global thing (amount of CO2 in the atmosphere) that it is a wonder to me how the populations don't just enter a tragedy of the commons. If oxygen-using species generate more carbon dioxide, plants grow better, producing more oxygen. No tragedy of the commons here once the feedback is in place. We're also talking about geological time scales.
- crpatino 12y agoThat's survivor bias. Earth looks in equilibrium to us because it changes very, very slowly... and we happen to evolve to make the most out of the current set of conditions. But I'd bet that to the living organisms of the Cambrian period, the current state of our planet would look like a complete (though slowly improving) wreck.