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.
> 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…
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.
Some back of the envelope math... One tree in a tropical rainforest sequesters 50 pounds of carbon. The Amazon contains 390 billion trees. Since industrialization humanity has cumulative released about a trillion tons of carbon. So if the entire Amazon burned down it would increase atmospheric carbon by less than 1%.
This is just a rough estimate, and I'd encourage others to check my calculations. But intuitively this seems correct. Extracting fossil fuels releases all the carbon sequestered by organisms over 100 million+ years. Burning down a rainforest only releases the carbon sequestered by organisms currently living.
I don't see how it wouldn't be possible for fossil fuels not to contain orders of magnitude more carbon than forests. Which is of course why the switch from wood to coal precipitated the industrial revolution.
I agree that burning fossil fuels release more CO2 into the atmosphere. I was not trying to imply that the rainforest will halt global warming, obviously it can’t because it’s been there the entire time.
However, I do believe just multiplying trees by weight does not accurately describe what carbon sequestration is. Trees are not the only place carbon is sequestered in a forest. Soil sediment, animals, and other plants also sequester. It’s also a home of biodiversity and nutrient run off that assists other parts of our global ecosystem. In turn, Carbon sequestration occurs over time; and it’s these rich, biodiverse ecosystems that produce the fossil fuels that we are burning, without them the carbon would never sink into the earth as it does.
Eliminating the rainforest halts the engine that cleans the atmosphere and removes the carbon and cools the earth. It would also dump millions of more tones into the atmosphere (even by your calculations). It would also disrupt global food chains which do produce our global breathable oxygen.
I’m not sure what your point is that you are making other than you imply that we don’t need to save the tropics because fossil fuels are worse; but I heartedly disagree with that implication.
That's actually pretty much true. At least, if it literally "vanished", without releasing biomass carbon back to the atmosphere.
In temperate ecosystems, there's net long-term storage of biomass and nutrients in soil. Mainly roots of dead plants. But also stuff that accumulates faster than it can decompose. Tundra and taiga are extreme examples.
But mature tropical ecosystems are pretty much in equilibrium, with ~zero net impact on the soil or atmosphere. Pretty much all mineral nutrients are locked up. And everything that dies gets recycled very quickly.
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?
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.
> 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]
My question was specifically about drugs that had passed safety and efficacy trials that were derived from the Amazon. Doing 5 minutes if searching and looking at your links it looks like quinine and curare are two of them. There was some mentions of some potential agents, but none that had made it through full clinical trials to be FDA approved. Quinine was first used for malaria treatment over 400 years ago. Two drugs over 400 years doesn’t seem like a lot.
And it doesn’t seem that it will get higher. My impression of modern pharmaceutical research is that instead of focusing on natural medicinal compounds, it is more focused on discovering the exact mechanisms behind various disease processes and synthesizing molecules that either slow down or speed up key pathways along those processes.
> There are many more if you are willing to do five minutes of research
but thats also how you end up on a geocities site about anti vaxxing because big pharma doesn't want you to know about the amazon and yell "exactly, I knew it all along!"
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.
Politics and business are incredibly complicated as well. In many ways it’s even harder to do reporting in those areas because there is no expert consensus you can consult. Is lowering corporate taxes better for the economy? There is little consensus. Even reporting “what people did” can be fraught with peril. (E.g. reporting that a company “paid no taxes” without addressing loss carry forwards.) Political and business systems, and in particular complex regulatory regimes like tax policy, are the product of many decades of refinement. Because journalists for the most part are ignorant of that history, they present every policy issue in this sort of context free way, leaning heavily on narrative and emotion to make up for their shallow understanding of the actual mechanics of what they’re writing about.
I think where the comparison breaks down is that the laws of physics are the laws of physics. Reporting on them doesn't change them. But politics lives in the same world as reporting. It is shaped by it, politicians respond to it. So the Gell-Mann effect isn't quite accurate in that situation. Journalists do know the political world deeply because for better or worse they're involved in shaping it.
Your comment illustrates the point even more in my opinion. You understand more about physics than politics, sports, and business, and so you're able to see how journalists can get it wrong. However, if you actually dived into the world of sports and similar fields about "human actors" there's a lot of interpersonal relations and complexity that can't be described in a 500 word article. If journalists were just reporting about the "what" then physics would be just like reporting sports scores if you just copy the result. When you try to explain the "how" and "why" then all the complexity that you described about physics applies to sports.
Maybe my original point was vague: I'm arguing that the "what" is simpler when human actors are involved. Person x said this, did this, accomplished that. The story is for the most part straightforward and understandable. And a lot of the reporting in these areas is just "what".
But people don't even have a good handle on the "what" of a lot of science (what are these new particles? what is p vs np?) which is why we get all these analogical half understandings.
I think the bigger question in a lot of human centric things is the "why" -- why did that head of state say that thing? Why does this company avoid that regulation? Why do people complain when this tax credit goes away? It's not reasonable to stop with the "what" in many situations. Or alternatively, the comparison to physics should be an article saying that the what is the spin of a single electron in an experiment, even though the experiment is about gravity -- missing the point entirely.
And backtracking slightly to my grandparent comment, Gell-Mann was coined by Michael Creighton who in the same quote compared Murray Gell-Mann's knowledge of physics to Creighton's knowledge of show business. The "what you know well enough to spot errors" can be anything as can the "what you blindly trust the reporter on out of your own ignorance."
> I'm arguing that the "what" is simpler when human actors are involved.
Where would you get that idea? It is definitely the other way around.
In hard sciences at least you can easily construct experiments and find out truths with time, which while complex, are basically predictable. In human sciences everything is much more complex and chaotic effects and problems with definitions and inherent unpredictability of humans make everything more complicated.
> 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.
I was interviewed via email while still homeless. They assumed I was male without asking, then just made up quotes. Because the interview was by email, I have a written record of what I actually said, so I know it was outright fabricated and not some kind of misheard/misunderstood thing.
I sort of understand the misgendering. Most visible street people are male. But the fabricated quote made me feel like "They think they can just do anything they want because I'm so poor." That felt like intentionally shitty behavior.
It's still shitty. General lack of ethics and honesty is not some moral high ground that sits above mere classism and contempt for the poor and presumed powerless.
In the US at least, a release form is required of those pictured in a news article by name for articles published by the AP or any major city newspaper like the NYT, Chicago Tribune, WaPo, or LA Times...
When you read news from something that you personally have been involved in, you will notice journalists simplify and often get things a bit confused.
Like, when a journalist quotes you in print, it is often not a real direct quote, but rather the journalists interpretation of what you said (which can be way off). Always insist to "check quotes" or you could get a surprise when you read your interview.
>> In contrast, other newspaper topics like politics, sports, business, etc. are often literal reporting of what people do
This comment should be preserved for all time and cited in the Gell-Mann Effect entry. Do you really think physics is infinitely more complicated than finance or politics?
I'm not sure about that specifically, but reporting on politics is much closer to the paper's core competency.
The paper runs articles on politics every single day. The characters and issues don't change too quickly: Quimby was the mayor last week; next week, he'll be the same mayor, dogged by the same scandals and trying to enact the same politics too. A lot of the facts are easy to check, if someone cared to do so. The reporters may have a background in political science or history, or something somewhat related.
In contrast, the science section is pretty small. Maybe it runs once a week and has one or two main reporters, who cover everything from Astronomy to Zoology. No one has a background in all of that, and many reporters don't have a technical background at all. You can try to fact check it, but the experts themselves don't always agree and it's hard to tell whether Dr. So-and-So is really an expert on the topic anyway.
And, despite all that, the science reporting I see does a pretty good job. One of my papers got a bit of media coverage, and pretty much everyone got the broad strokes right. One place made me sound a little too exuberant about the immediate ramifications; another made me sound a bit too negative, but neither was egregiously bad.
> reporting on politics is much closer to the paper's core competency.
And despite this, most of the media got the two of the most significant political happenings of the last 5 years (US elections and Brexit) completely wrong.
By saying "most of media gets it wrong" without any examples, everyone agrees, and noone needs to think about what the media said or what happened at all. Everyone reading can be right and everyone else can be wrong at the same time.
Less snarkily - what media narrative are you referencing specifically? What do you believe occured instead? There was much media covering many angles on both of these issues.
I agree that they incorrectly predicted future events, but no one should be able to that with absolute certainty. Past events are, of course, much easier to report accurately.
What does "got wrong" mean in this context, though? People said the media got those things wrong because they said "90% chance Clinton wins" and Trump won. But that's why they said 90%, not 100%. It feels as though the concept of probabilities is either misunderstood or willfully ignored to score points.
In the initial formulation of the Gell-Mann effect, Michael Crichton noted that the coverage of show business was equally simplified.
From discussions with my wife, who is board certified in infectious diseases, newspaper coverage of the following topics are simplified to the point of losing the main point: antimicrobial resistance, any tropical disease from malaria to Ebola, organ rejection.
Any decent news report will of course have coverage of the literal facts, this will also be overshadowed by interpretation of the meaning of those facts. Any dry reporting which only present the facts without a hint as to how the reader should be reacting to those facts is unpopular and will be read by negligible few. It starts right from the headline that takes a view one way or the other. A number isn't presented without an adjective.
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. ....
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.
> 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.
> The blogger is completely wrong on this point as well.
I think you may not have read the article closely enough:
>> Plants produce oxygen through photosynthesis (green arrow). However, the the same plants consume the equivalent of over half the oxygen they produce in their own respiration ... my own team's research suggests this is more like 60%
>> The remaining 40% of the Amazon oxygen budget is consumed mainly by microbes breaking down the dead leaves and wood of the rainforest, a natural process called heterotrophic respiration
> Similarly, we should all be reminded that when skimming blogs and comments you're likely to come across misleading and inaccurate content
The "blogger" who wrote this article is "Professor of Ecosystem Science, University of Oxford" and "Founding Director, Oxford Centre for Tropical Forests" and probably knows more about this than you or I. This is not a peer reviewed paper, but it is probably more accurate than science journalism by a non-ecologist on this topic.
> my own team's research suggests this is more like 60%
My point was he hasn't cited that research - if it is concluded ? published? reviewed?
He seems to be just having a technical rant about a contextual phrase while giving the impression that forests in general, or at least the amazon or equatorial forests do not help maintain the atmospheres oxygen content. That would certainly be a maveric proposition at this stage in Earth sciences.
> I think you may not have read the article closely enough
I did read the article closely :)
>> Plants produce oxygen through photosynthesis (green arrow). However, the the same plants consume the equivalent of over half the oxygen they produce in their own respiration ... my own team's research suggests this is more like 60%
>> The remaining 40% of the Amazon oxygen budget is consumed mainly by microbes breaking down the dead leaves and wood of the rainforest, a natural process called heterotrophic respiration
The author is stating that the Amazon rainforest is in perfect equilibrium without citing any studies or evidence. There are plenty of studies that indicate otherwise, such as this 30 year survey involving 100 researchers: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283
> While this analysis confirms that Amazon forests have acted as a long-term net biomass sink, we find a long-term decreasing trend of carbon accumulation.
But even if we accept the author's argument that today the Amazon is in perfect equilibrium -- I think it was misleading of the author not to clarify that in order for any forest to grow, it must be a net carbon sink and net oxygen producer up to that point in the forest's lifetime.
Now the comment that I originally replied to said something different. That comment argued that forests cannot be net producers of oxygen because there aren't "ever growing [piles of wood]" and then he provided the Wikipedia article for photosynthesis as evidence supporting that. That's wrong as I explained above.
You can have forests that are net carbon sinks and net producers of oxygen and you don't need "ever growing [piles of wood]" in order for that to happen.
A single plant does produce oxygen while it's alive, and the carbon is bound in its growing body.
But that carbon is all released back as it decomposes after its death.
On a "whole forest/whole year" perspective, there is normally an equal mass of plants growing and being decomposed, and thus the net oxygen effect is zero.
> But that carbon is all released back as it decomposes after its death.
> On a "whole forest/whole year" perspective, there is normally an equal mass of plants growing and being decomposed, and thus the net oxygen effect is zero.
Sure, if you're talking about a timespan of one hour, one month, one year, etc then it's definitely possible for biological processes in a forest to expel carbon in the form of CO2 in equal volumes that were sequestered by plants. You could even have an overpopulation of some kind of insect or fungus cause a forest to temporarily become a net contributor of atmospheric carbon.
But over the lifetime over the forest, the net effect is obviously massive CO2 sequestration and massive O2 production. If the net carbon impact was zero over the lifetime of a forest, then forests would have no soil. But we know that not to be the case. Forests grow, they accumulate soil, etc.
Despite constant heavy rains and erosion, soil in the Amazon rainforest is often several meters deep and spans an area of over 2 million square miles. That's a lot of carbon sequestration!
We're talking about oxygen production. Not carbon sequestration.
Regarding sequestration: the carbon goes into the trunk, branches, roots and leaves of the tree. Leaves fall off the tree, rot and become soil. The tree eventually dies, rots and becomes soil.
Some carbon will be given off by various decomposition processes, but the overall net effect is by far a carbon sink.
If forests did not then some other body of plant mass would have to - erosion and weathering of rocks takes a lot of oxygen out of the atmosphere, and this needs replaced by biology by photosynthesis. In the long term this is the reason the Earth needs to "breathe", and plants are how it has done so.
Plants die and are eaten by ranging animals, dispersing their material, creating soils and eventually sediments. This is a long cycle through which carbon is returned to ground, sometimes to metamorphic rock.
It takes place at a lower intensity than our burning of fossil material and forests in recent history. Regrowing forest, usefully captures carbon and releases oxygen more rapidly than mature forest, but of course not rapidly enough to make up for burning them down.
The paper that you cite is talking about small changes.
> Under the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) RCP8.5 scenario, approximately 100Gt (gigatonnes) of O2 would be removed from the atmosphere per year until 2100, and the O2 concentration will decrease from its current level of 20.946% to 20.825%.
2018 209460 ppm
2100 208250 ppm
That's 15 ppm per year.
From Stolper et al. (2016) A Pleistocene ice core record of atmospheric O2 concentrations:[0]
> We present a record of Po2 reconstructed using O2/N2 ratios from ancient air trapped in ice. This record indicates that Po2 declined by 7 per mil (0.7%) over the past 800,000 years, requiring that O2 sinks were ~2% larger than sources.
That's 7000 ppm decrease over 800000 years, or 0.009 ppm per year. And so yes, atmospheric oxygen concentration is dropping lots faster now. But TFA's point that it's slow, and regulated by long-term processes, is still valid.
So that's where he is getting the context for his rant >>
"So, in all practical terms, the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world's oxygen is effectively zero."
Practically, the reason why we have oxygen in the atmosphere is plant photosynthesis over long terms. We can quibble over the net annual product of every forest and ecosystem as he has - but over geological timeframes, the plant life they contain is the reason we have any oxygen to breath. And if the amazon currently amounts to about 20% of the plant life on earth now, its not wrong to teach that it is doing 20% of the oxygen maintaining.
The fact that long term maintenance is obscured by shorter term dynamics including our modern industrial activity, does not make a lie of the understanding and respect that forests are lungs of the planet.
I am lately thinking that we are assigning too less value to this fact. We all need oxygen and we should have enough forests to produce it and this means that we should globally subsidize forest keeping. It is not a single country problem. It is a global problem.
1. The article explained this isn't true. Carbon dioxide is a problem. Oxygen depletion is not. Burning enough forests to decrease atmospheric oxygen by just 1% would increase CO2 by 5000%. We'd be dead long before we ran out of oxygen.
2. I'm not sure what you have in mind for "short term" vs "long term", but oxygen levels only change significantly over hundreds of millions of years.
3. Just like a stable sized forest doesn't produce any significant net oxygen, humans don't overall use up oxygen from breathing. The plants you eat (or if you're eating meat, the plants your food ate) released oxygen into the air when forming the carbohydrates and fats you eat. Your body then recombines these with an equal amount of oxygen to produce energy.
> over geological timeframes, the plant life they contain is the reason we have any oxygen to breath
About 1/2 of the oxygen produced is produced by Phytoplankton, which are not plants (though they are similar).
> And if the amazon currently amounts to about 20% of the plant life on earth now
The amazon accounts 16% of the photosynthesis on land.
> its not wrong to teach that it is doing 20% of the oxygen maintaining.
It is wrong. If you want to provide a nice round, reasonably accurate number you should use 10%.
> does not make a lie of the understanding and respect that forests are lungs of the planet.
Forests are important and and a significant part of the respiration of them planet, but they are less important than our oceans. Our oceans are the true lungs of the planet (edit: and they are not in great shape, atmospheric oxygen may not be an issue, but oxygenation of the ocean is more variable).
Burning the amazon down is something to worry about. Not afforesting widely and extracting timber from the amazon ecologically so it sequesters carbon and supplies materials replacing demand for carbon intense alternatives - is tragedy.
The advice that amazons contribution is "zero", hedged under this safety-net word "effectively" is false to the understanding of geophysics and natural history. I hope the professor will clarify his language after consideration.
> the piece seems to fly in the face of professional work on the subject.
The blogger does professional work on the subject. The article makes it pretty clear that the net positive production of oxygen the the Amazon is so close to zero that it is only relevant on the time scale of millions of years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a follow up to my above, it's the weight of the forest that matters. Older forests typically fit bigger and denser and heavier trees, so the age of a forest still matters a lot. But a fairly established forest like the Amazon is not changing the amount of oxygen out carbon dioxide in the air unless it's expanding or contracting
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
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.
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.
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.
This subject has been treated so irresponsibly these past few days that not only people are making inaccurate statements such as "the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen", but also high profile people such as Emmanuel Macron (France's President) and Cristiano Ronaldo (World famous soccer player) are sharing false information and photos[1]
All of US presidential candidates, democratic and republican alike, routinely and knowingly push blatant lies as a part of their platform and nobody blinks an eye. If you went through what they say with a fine toothed comb and removed all the lies, there'd be hardly anything left. People don't care about facts. They care about how a narrative makes them feel. Sad but true.
Agree. There's purposefully lying to achieve targets, and ignorantly spreading lies that help someone in addition to lending them credibility and exposure. The latter hurts more than the former: For instance, Cristiano Ronaldo is a much bigger influencer than most Senators or even Hollywood personalities can ever hope to be. I think, people like them need to exercise great caution, if they intend to mean well and not cause harm.
While it's true most politicians lie or bend facts or report them wrongly, you can not create a false equivalence between them all. Trump lies egregiously and far more than basically any non dictatorial politician. Your stance reminds me of those who said both 2016 candidates were bad, so they didn't vote or voted for the two clown third party candidates.
The entirety of Hillary Clinton's campaign could be summarized as "it's my turn, orange man bad". I can't vote for that. In 2019 I likewise can't vote for open borders, "free money" for everyone, multi-trillion dollar ill-conceived "green deals", or "reparations", because I'd be the one paying for all this shit. Plus, _all_ democratic presidential candidates made the Charlottesville hoax the centerpiece of their campaign, so they too lie 100% knowingly about it.
Regarding the pictures, many pictures of burning forests were shared on social networks those past few days (eg. Instagram stories).
Those are images of fires to illustrate people's message, they convey the greater concept that we should be aware of the Earth as a global shared system. No one is saying 'look at this picture of the Amazon burning right now' (not even in the Macron's tweet).
Regarding "the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen", I guess it could be debated, and the biodiversity would probably have been a better argument.
> Regarding "the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen", I guess it could be debated,
I think it is flat out wrong and not really debatable. Also, focusing on oxygen is not the right thing to talk about because we have so much more oxygen than carbon dioxide.
Before we manage to consume significant amounts of our oxygen, we will have released so much carbon dioxide that a slight dip in O2 will not be a concern.
The red regions are largely tropical rainforest. Exceedingly highly productive, but not particularly viable for human agricultural activity.
What stands out are the regions which I'm aware are highly agriculturally productive, indicated in green and cyan: the eastern half of the US, generally, the Argentine and Brazillian Pampas regions, the Sahel, Europe (particularly western Europe -- England, France, and Germany), and south and East Asia. A small patch of Central America.
Notably contrasting: the western US, other than a thin strip (the central valleys of California and Oregon), the Australia, other than the extreme south-eastern band, the Sahara, virtually all of Russia, western South America, and most of Canada. And of course, the Sahara and Antarctica.
We're feeding 7.7 billions of souls on those regions of green and light blue. Those are also the regions in which the great civilisations of the past have developed -- compare with a time-lapse of human population such as:
What do you do when people quote statistics like this in real life? I usually just sit there like an insincere fool and remain quiet or offer lukewarm agreement. I can't bring myself to tell them that I disagree because I don't want to be rude but at the same time my current system is not working.
I found that, for me at least, it kinda works to not outright disagree, but to say that you 'read an article' that disputed said fact and now you're confused about whether it's actually true. I usually see one of three things happening: they say something along the lines of "oh, I don't know a lot about that, so I can't tell you" and the conversation moves on, they tell you "it's obviously bullshit, because I read it in $magazine", or they'll engage with it to try and lift your confusion. In the latter case, you can feed them arguments and facts, but since it's not a debate ("you're wrong" - "no, YOU are wrong"), it's easier for them to see when/where their beliefs fall short.
Probably incorporate their concerns when they vote. Choose representatives, leaders, groups you support (parties), that share your concern, that try to have an efficient foreign policy that cares about these things.
Naturally, this includes some marketing to support the message and to try to persuade as many people as you can.
A few comments are saying that forests capture a lot of CO2.
But how could that be? If a forest doesn't change over thousands of years it cannot be accumulating carbon in any significant quantity. Or else where would that material go?
The Amazon trees are about as tall and wide today as they were 10,000 years ago, and only so many of them fit on a given area. If the amount of vegetation remains the same the only way for a forest to capture carbon would be to accumulate an ever-increasing layer of it under the forest floor. That would be a lot of combustible material accumulated over millions of years that Amazon was around, and I'm pretty sure it isn't there (otherwise certain people would be mining it already).
Amazon is not scrubbing carbon out of the air, and neither does any other forest of static size. The carbon has to go into the ground to remain sequestered.
>>>A few comments are saying that forests capture a lot of CO2.
As you indicate, those people are incorrect. But a forest may contain a lot of C02, such that burning it all at once increases the amount in the atmosphere noticeably.
The only way it could work is for the top soil to grow thicker by the year, reaching huge depths over tens of millions of years. As I recall my temperate forests, the topsoil is skin-deep, relatively speaking.
If you take a core sample from an established forest it's often got at least 5-6 feet of heavy dark carbon rich soil beneath. That's the case on my property anyways. I had some trees moved with a giant tree spade some years back. Sandy soil, but the top 5 feet was nice and dark. The area would have been forest and marsh only about 50-100 years ago.
Amazon has been around for 55 million years. Do you think we will find the topsoil to be 55,000,000 / 100 * 5 feet thick? I wager it went up to like 20 feet max in the first million years and hasn’t changed since then.
it's just less accessible but I'm pretty sure like any forest on the face of the earth, portions of dead animal and plant matter is getting sequestered into the ground while another portion is getting exhaled by animals eating the leaves or other animals eating the animals.
The stuff that's getting sequestered though is probably miniscule. At the timescale of our lifetime it may be negligible but I wouldn't know as I'm not an expert. Perhaps someone with the actual data can fill us in?
> A final point to make is that the atmosphere is awash with oxygen, at 20.95% or 209,500 ppm (parts per million). Carbon dioxide, by comparison, is around 405 ppm and rising by around 2-3 ppm per year, over 500 times less. Human activity (around 90% of which being fossil fuel combustion) has caused this concentration to drop by around 0.005% since 1990, a trivial amount. In parallel, the same activities have caused carbon dioxide concentrations to rise by by 37 ppm since 1990, or 10%. This is a much more substantial percentage because there is so little carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to begin with, so human activities can make a major difference. This is why we need to worry about the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (and its resulting impact on climate), and why we don't need to worry about running out of oxygen.
The 3 order of magnitude difference is the relevant bit of info.
So while it takes millions of years for the amazon to have an impact on )2 levels, impacts on CO2 levels happen on the time scale of thousands of years.
This is also why it makes more sense to be concerned about the CO2 being released by burning the Amazon than the oxygen consumed by the fire.
Even if a tiny amount was sequestered each year over the course of 55 million years there would be a huge pile of carbon there. But it isn’t there, is it?
my initial reply was a post about oil mining in the amazon...
Additionally tectonic plates move, 55 million years ago the amazon probably wasn't even there. Additionally oil found on land could've been produced by biomass under the ocean and vice versa it's all moving around all the time. Likely the oil found underneath the amazon could have been produced at a time where that tectonic plate was under water.
You aren't accounting for the trees being living, growing beings. Asking how they capture CO2 is kind of like asking how we grab oxygen- it's in the air, we use it to fuel our growth and stay alive, and then it's CO2 when it leaves our bodies. It's the reverse for trees, I don't know if any significant amount of solid carbon would need to accumulate, as it forms the wood and the varies trees that grow and die.
I haven't been following this specific news story, but I remember from my environmental sociology class that fire prevention in forests eventually leads to unnatural states that are then prone to massive uncontainable fires. Have they been suppressing natural fire in this region for too long? If this fire is naturally burning, then isn't the best response to let it run its course unless human lives are threatened?
> Have they been suppressing natural fire in this region for too long?
This is confusing for many people, I know.
Ecosystems tend to increase its complexity with time. From lava field to savanna to forests. This is how it works. Life fills the gaps.
If untouched, forests aim for the higher state of organisation possible, the so called "climax": A big forest, with huge old trees. Plants accumulate water, big plants accumulate big water, plants make water also (Is a by-product of this respiration)...
...therefore the climax is a humid forest of some kind (a rainforest, a bamboo cloudforest, a laurisilva, a scottish caledonian rainforest, a sequoia forest)
A place full of spongy fungus and plants accumulating water, a place that creates its own climate and make rains that collect in streams and then in rivers for the people benefit. They do not need fire to work at all. Wildfires are scarce and self-contained events. Such places would need a lot of energy to start burning.
The young forest is vulnerable to fire. For decades the fire risk increases. This is that people remember, but sadly they do not see the second part. After a thousand years, the risk start decreasing and then the entire area is fire-proof. Wildfires stop often when reaching an old forest.
The tragedy is that before to reach this state of full healing, the forest is burned again BY MAN (>90% of wildfires are caused by man). Is called "necessary management" or "reducing the risk", but life does not need human management. Has evolved to sustain maximum amount of life possible. We need "Management" is another way to say we want "nature explotation". Is the "groundhog day" film with trees.
Nobody is trying to restore it and return the water to Mediterranean or to California because... it would need two or three human generations to show results and it would need much smarter humans.
I’d love to read more on this humid forest climax narrative from any credible sources, it sounds interesting and I don’t know anything about this sort of thing really, but at the same time it’s tripping my “just-so” sensors something heavy!
I bet that you will find plenty of credible sources if you study biology and learn some basic ecology (ecology as science, not as ideology). None of what I'm saying is a secret and is also easily verifiable empirically.
There are also parts of this science that deal with the study of stress in ecosystems. A low or medium source of stress can increase the biodiversity. A mix of healed and degraded ecosystems can provide habitats for different types of life beings. A big source of stress otherwise will distroy all the job done by time and simplify the ecosystem. Moreover, the damage can be so deep that the new state of organisation enters in a loop. The remain is just too flammable to advance and the only species surviving benefit from fire so they need fire to keep competitors at bay, germinate and survive. And they make fire creating flammable structures. Fire triggers water quiting the area and will distroy soil organic structure. Without water the future of the area enters in a reverse path, to savanna, then arid, finally desert. Is happening in California for example.
For climate change figthing purposes, the closer to the ecological climax, the better chance for long-term human survivorship.
Climate change will actively distroy climactic ecosystems also (more hurricans, etc), so the problem is more complicated that "just stop chopping trees and damaging coral reefs with tourist cruises". We can expect a lot of problems and extinction cascades in the future.
A good book that talks about this effect, along with lots of interesting connections between thermodynamics and ecology, is "Into the cool" by Sagan and Schneider
This is not true of the rainforests themselves, but the Amazon region is not 100% rainforest. It also has savannas and drier forests in parts of it (it's a massive region).
These are fires for agricultural land. They're much smaller than natural forest fires but many of them are set at once at the beginning of the season, so it's still a lot of forest on fire.
A subtle point that is often missed is that only a growing plant population and ecosystem will have a positive oxygen balance and negative CO2 balance (trapping CO2 as tree biomass at ever increasing volume). Stable ecosystems reach an equilibrium and the carbon cycle stabilizes and net oxygen/CO2 production consumption becomes zero.
To increase net oxygen levels in the atmosphere and reduce CO2 levels we would also have to eliminate a lot of the microorganisms that help recycle dead trees and go back to the Paleozoic era and before when these organisms didn't exist and the Earth witnessed several glaciation events.
Adding more stable forests to the world does not reduce CO2 levels or increase oxygen levels (relative to after it becomes a stable forest). It just speeds up the carbon cycle.
If trees sequester carbon in their trunks and release oxygen, what do they use the oxygen for at night, and how come they are oxygen-neutral, do they store it somehow?
Also, if the Amazon is a carbon sink today, what about if there was dieback? It would turn into a carbon source, but how? Don’t the “unit economics” of trees remain the same?
Oversimplifiying: Some of the carbon goes to the wood and some goes to sugar. During the night the plant "burns" the sugar with oxygen produce energy. (If you keep a plant in hermetic place without oxygen and without light, it would die, exactly like an animal.)
(Notes about the oversimpliplification: Wood is made of cellulose that is a carbohydrate and sugar is algo a carbohydrate, they are quite similar chemically. Also, plants produce and "burn" other compounds.)
What this article doesn't go into is if the forest is destroyed, what the net effect is, it consumes as much oxygen as it produces, but once those animals have no oxygen they will put a strain on the surronding ecosystem. Not to mention the flash floods that will result from the lack of vegetation
This thread feels politically toxic. The discussions seems to be heavily focused on a “gotcha”, exploiting a kind of Guilt By Association fallacy to minimize the disturbing event unfolding in the Amazon.
“The lungs of the world” is a poetic phrase. Trying to make it literal diminishes it, by giving cynics a small thread to pull on until it unravels — while in the process ignoring all the other ways in which the Amazon is important.
A vibrant discussion of the original post would be relevant — using the misaccounting as a cudgel against environmentalists and journalism as a whole is explicitly not the spirit of HN.
I googled some and it looks like Amazon rainforest alone removes about a quarter of fossil fuel CO2 from the atmosphere. That's more than I thought it'd be. And it looks like it could sequester much more if there was more phosphorus in the soil.
Quote: "The Amazon Basin is critical to help mitigate climate change due to its trees absorbing around a quarter of the CO2 released each year from the burning of fossil fuels."
This is why you need to be careful about understanding and quoting scientific facts.
The specific quote is talking about trees in the rainforest, not the rainforest itself. The rainforest is an ecological system that also produces CO2 (mainly through microbes breaking down wood) and you can't ignore the rest of the system.
Which is not to say that the Amazon doesn't play a significant in the global environment and weather systems.
So far there have not been too many third-party merchants who have profited on selling oxygen, but once they do, Amazon will definitely move in and take on this part of the market as well.
I think the oxygen in the tree materials is already combined with carbon in the form of CxHyOz hydrocarbons, where x,y,z = atoms of the respective atomic species.
Burning cellulose (poly-C6 H10 O5) to CO2 and H2O would require (for each molecule): 12O (for 6CO2) and 5O (for 5H2O). This is a total of 17O.
Cellulose contains only 5O, so 12O (or 6O2) would be required for a full stoichiometric burn of cellulose.
You know what, it really doesn't matter because the majority of people don't really care about and understand all of the other effects. People don't even understand global warming or care enough to do anything about it. Talking heads, pundits, and politicians should just inflate the numbers and say that it provides 50% of oxygen and that we'll all asphyxiate without it because the truth is that people won't care unless you make them scared enough to care. If the end goal is to save as much of the forest as possible then stretching the truth doesn't matter. How many lies have been told from the other side for decades to reduce environmental regulations?
"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.