Oxigen is ALSO, and perhaps in vast quantities produced at the bottom of the ocean, by lumps of metal that react with sea water (aka Dark Oxygen). Interestingly, there are now massive marine harvesting operations targeting that very ore.
Now look up the temperatures within the water column. I don't see any notes about pressure. Temperature is one axis ...
Your charts show several "green house gases" and with some squinting and handwaving could be used to "prove" that the seas are mopping up those gases and saving the planet.
I used to keep tropical fish and they somehow managed to survive in water temperatures way higher than the open seas. In an aquarium it is the surface water area (not volume) that generally decides how many fish can live within it. The surface area determines how much oxygen can be absorbed, Oxygenating plants help and agitating the surface increases the surface area - it does not "mix in" oxygen.
solubility of gases in water is a general phenomenon, yes water is solvent for a lot of things, and that exacerbates the situation, more gases, mean partial solubility rather than the whole solubility, so that would mean even less oxygen dissolved in a volume of water.
you need to update your model of physical chemistry, there are a number of issues to your detriment.
as temperature increases, gas solubility decreases across the board, solvent caging of water is inhibited at higher temperatures.
the issue is not only oxygen. water must be solvent to ammonia, and CO2 to an extent compatible with physiology.
it wont matter how much O2 is dissolved if you cant excrete your waste products.
CO2 dissolved in water at quantity will convert partially to carbonic acid, lowering the pH of the water, and dissolving Ca++ Carbonate this means its harder to make a shell, and what shell you have is dissolving at an increased rate.
The note on pressure is near the top of the page. "at one atmosphere (101.325 kPa) ". How would we even move the pressure axis for the ocean? I have no idea what you're complaining about.
Deep-sea mining has been studied and foreseen for at least 50 years, but it's never been economical. It is possible that current technology will allow for mining of nodules, but this still seems unlikely to me.
COMPLETED: Sponsorship Agreement
COMPLETED: Exploration Contract
COMPLETED: SK1300 NORI Technical Resource Statement; SK-1300 NORI-D Project Initial Assessment (PEA)(Excel tables)
SUBMITTED: Collector Test Environmental and Social Impact Assessment
APPROVED: Pilot Nodule Collector System Test
COMPLETED: Pilot Nodule Collector System Test
COMPLETED: Collector Test and Monitoring
June 27, 2025: Exploitation contract application submission expected
The cost of not addressing it is more distributed: at some point you can't go outside anymore since the UV index is so high, sunscreen can't block high-intensity UV-B and UV-C, plants get damaged to the point of catastrophic crop failures... you can live in denial about climate change in developed countries (for a limited time anyway) but ozone affects everyone.
True but at the time the ozone hole was mostly over the Antarctic so the average person didn't feel its effects which wouldn't then contribute to the change in policy.
I get where you're coming from - our vantage point has a lot to do with that though. The average member of the public never had to sacrifice or even know about ozone, and there's so much complexity to climate science. People have a surface deep impression of what stands to be lost and they're working against a powerful propaganda machine. Virtually all extractive industry makes the problem worse, whether cattle farming, timber, energy, etc.
If you want to go older and more localised you could look at forestry and fisheries laws. Sometimes we self-regulate and form a stable state, other times we over-extract until collapse
When the costs are low and require no change in personal behaviour, nor even belief in the problem. Billions of people had no idea about changes to aerosol propellants or refrigerants and they were not required to know or agree in order to solve the problem.
Do people have to know about what generates their electricity? They get input now, but we could probably just stop taking public input on new infrastructure and that would avoid poorly motivated protests of wind farms or nuclear.
They do not need to know what generates there electricity but...
- when what generates the power changes the landscape they can see, many people get upset, however irrationally
- many people are emotionally attached to lifestyle objects that use fossil fuels, i.e. cars, boats, planes, etc
- even where there are good options, most people are not willing to spend one extra penny
- even when there are options that cost less (i.e. bicycles, walking) humans spend a lot of their energy thinking about status and struggle to voluntarily choose things that they fear might result in a loss of status
- even if you solve all that, collective action problems are a named thing for a reason - they are hard and don't necessarily have obvious answers.
My point is not that everything is hopeless, but that OP who said "Have we ever as a species successfully changed our behavior on a scale..." has a point that we will have to grapple with if we want to actually change stuff. Wishing human nature away doesn't actually solve anything.
Perhaps more importantly than any of those, often people react out of fear of what they think other people will think.
Maybe everyone bitches about gas prices, but we would all get over it pretty fast if politicians just pulled the band-aid off. Instead they use it as an opportunity to pull down any crab that tries to save us from the bucket.
Good point - maybe also stop taking public input on decisions. :V
I kid, but I get more sympathetic to totalitarian countries seeing how people react to some things too. it simplifies "banding together" if there's fewer decision makers I guess and I can't think of a good way to have that squared with democracy.
the kind of changes that were required to avoid massive famines also rely on chemical fertilizer. aaand.... "the production of chemical fertilizers, particularly synthetic nitrogen-based ones, is a highly energy-intensive process that creates significant amounts of carbon dioxide"
Historically speaking over over a billion years almost every species has consumed one thing and output another to the point of extinction while another species that consumes that grows and repeats the cycle.
Climate change has been the story of evolution since life appeared on earth and aglae filled the atmosphere with gasses.
We almost eradicated several diseases, usually screwed over by designating an Omelasan child (though, that's a bad characterization, because letting parts of the world continue to suffer and serve as a reservoir for those diseases was actually completely unnecessary).
I think that the banng of HFCs is a pretty good example of collective action.
Also, it's important to realize that climate change, as we best understand it right now, is not a "or perish" type of situation. RCP8.5 has now been soundly eliminated from the set of potential climate trajectories, so what we're left with is a question of 1) how much mass migration will be forced upon the world, with concomitant wars and social strife, and 2) how much economic loss results from that, as well as from lost opportunity by not adopting cheaper renewable energy routes.
Technological innovation has done something absolutely remarkable: the future with the cheapest and most abundant energy is the one that switches to renewable energy and storage the fastest. Every day we delay, not only do we end up with a worse climate outcome, but we also just light money on fire, with worse economic efficiency. And in economies built on the continual compounding interest of technological advancement, we subject humanity to far greater poverty for every day we delay the transition.
Most of the world will benefit from this technological change happening quickly. There will be some outliers, like the US, that choose to be poorer and less influential by actively subverting renewable energy in the marketplace (the Trump administration has done a huge amount of economic damage in only a small amount of time), but the US will come around. Texas is leading the way, because they are actually market driven more than they are politically driven, but the rest of the US is kind of screwed on that front for a while.
I'm not understanding how this observation relates to my comment, in any way.
Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels. The areas that are just developing widespread electricity now will do it far cleaner than the US did, skipping the lower development stages of electricity and jumping directly into the future, if that's what you're saying. But I'm having trouble understanding what you mean.
The average person in the rest of the world lives in a dramatically different social structure than Western late stage capitalism. In effect the social contract of capitalism was "give up the culture, social institutions, etc. that make for a stable collectivist society and in exchange enjoy the benefits of consumerism." I don't think it is surprising that people are angry when the Capital class decides that they don't get the consumerism either.
True, but most people don't think about why that is the case. They'll blame slavery (abolished over 160 years ago), or the "exploitation" by capitalists (that produce wealth for all). Some may claim that the US has more natural resources, but The US is rich because of the freedoms and rights that our citizens have. Look at the poverty of the Soviet Union or Mao's China, or in Cuba today.
I cannot for the life of me understand the increasing popularity of socialism and communism in the US today. Those forms of government have a proven track record of failure.
Let's consider the economies of Communist nations. I suggest we take into account a bit of regional history.
North Korea is a basket case. But after three generations of tyrants it is arguably a monarchy.
China is a success story, end of. By any measure, China has come a long way since the Communist regime took over in 1949.
You could say something similar about Soviet Russia. By the 1980s it had stagnated, but the average Russian was incomparably better off than in 1917.
How far have Russians come since then? Has capitalism ushered in a golden age of prosperity and well-being? Here's a clue: life expectancy peaked in 1986. Russians lived longer 40 years ago, under Communism, than they do today.
Vietnam has done reasonably well since other countries stopped invading it.
American foreign policy hasn't done much for Cubans, either. Especially in the last few months.
Perhaps we should finally let go of the cold war mindset. It's imperial thinking, and we can't afford it. US power is fading fast.
Castro and Ho Chi Minh will go down in (our) history as Communist revolutionaries, but they weren't fighting against capitalism. They succeeded by uniting their people against colonial rule.
The USA was the colonial power that Castro was fighting, of course.
At least we no longer think of Nelson Mandela as a Communist and a terrorist. The US state department finally acknowledged as much in 2008, nearly 10 years after he had retired as president of RSA.
Note that I referred to Mao Zedong's China and not the China of today, which has embraced a "controlled capitalism" after their flirtation with communism failed miserably (as it always does).
Can you trust the USSR lifespan statistics? I wouldn't.
You cite other countries, none of which are under a purely communist government, because that has never worked out for anyone other than the dictators that ruled them.
Socialism is increasingly popular because people are seeing that capitalism makes them LESS free. People don't have the freedom to own a home, the freedom to get medical care, the freedom to travel, etc. When they see that many of those things (particularly medical care) are available in socialist (relative to the US) countries, it's no surprise that they abandon capitalism.
"We"?
if by "we" you mean Chinese, then yes, as THEY have maintained a cultural structure and language far longer than we have, and adapting themselves and there environment to do that was something they have been doing successfully for millenia,China still venerates the first engineer "Gun"assigned to control the flooding on the yallu river 3300 years ago, and it is then no surprise that they are building solar, wind and other renewable fossil/carbon free energy sources at an unprecidented rate, and ultra high voltage grid systems to distribute that energy, while we wring our hands committing genocide on the Palistinians.
They've also gone through 13 major dynasties and about 2 societal collapses. That of course doesn't undo China's amazing cultural, technological, and social advances and achievements over the millenia, but it does suggest that their history is more nuanced.
Oxygen loss already happens, see news about dead fish.
Issue here is that becomes more common and underwater oxygen loss is approaching an “unsafe space” with impacts likely irreversible within human lifetimes, some of which could persist for centuries.
The feedback loop between warming and deoxygenation is particularly concerning for deep-water systems that have been stable for millennia. If we hit the thresholds mentioned where the ocean's 'internal clock' is disrupted, it might permanently alter nutrient cycling beyond what current atmospheric models predict. I'm curious if any researchers here have insight into whether localized aeration tech could mitigate this in crucial spawning grounds, or if the scale is simply too vast.
Next post would be what: Human hubris as measured by UN Hubris Measuring Commitee now threatens to collapse the entire solar system into a purple hole?
Can we please snap out of it and use something like if not common sense but at least a Fermi approach? Or did he die in vain?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-discove...