The oceans are dying

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by Kennyc, Jun 21, 2011.

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  1. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    Ahh hell to be honest, because of the fact the Methane Hydrates are coming loose, I think we are pretty much fucked in that regard no matter what we do but it will take about 100 hundred years. Clean water and food, is going to be an issue in less than 10 years for most of the people on this planet.

    I think there is a solution to the Hydrates problem but I don't think humans are "together" enough to solve it.
     
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  3. Believe Happy medium Valued Senior Member

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    I wonder if the ocean is dying, or just changing? From some of the evidence I've seen the biomass is just adjusting/changing to different lower type lifeforms. As the fish and others are killed off by us jelly fish thrive. Of course we don't really eat jelly fish so that's a problem. The algae blooms that starve all the fish of oxygen are also a great big pile of food for the jelly fish.

    Now, there are so many jelly fish that they are starting to take food away from fish that would compete with/eat the jelly fish.

    So again I wonder if you added up all the new jelly fish/algae blooms if they would be just as much as what is being lost.
     
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  5. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    Not likely.

    http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2007.hydrate_rev.pdf

    Unlikely to be much different than it is now, and currently fewer percent of people are hungry than in any recent history. Since we won't have that many more people than we have now in 10 years, things are not likely to change very much, particularly since the latest NASA research showed that the Net Primary Productivity of the Terrestrial Biosphere is going up by about 3% per decade (which is a huge amount of plant material).

    FAO estimates that a total of 925 million people are undernourished in 2010 compared with 1.023 billion in 2009. Most of the decrease was in Asia, with 80 million fewer hungry, but progress was also made in sub-Saharan Africa, where 12 million fewer people are going hungry.

    But we had ~900 million undernourished in 1970, so on a percentage basis we are doing much better.

    Arthur
     
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  7. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    Expect that opinion on hydrates to change in the next 5 years. You can count on it. We are going to grossly accelerate the process like a little kid who makes a big snowball then pushes it downhill.
     
  8. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,635
    I first heard that in 1998, that the "clathrate gun" would accelerate warming tremendously within 5 years. Didn't happen then.

    Nowadays I tend to discount the more sensationalist stories of the disasters that will befall us from climate change. The boring account of gradually increasing temperatures over the next century is far more supportable, albeit less exciting and news-worthy.
     
  9. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    The disasters are already happening, massive flooding in the midwest, unprecedented numbers of tornadoes, people having to relocate from the Pacific and Alaska because their villages are getting washed away...
     
  10. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    Any evidence that any of this is related to global warming?

    A more mundane explanation:

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110509/ap_on_re_us/us_la_nina_s_extremes

    Consider that during our recent "cold decade", 1974 April 3–4: a series of 148 twisters within 16 hours comprised the deadly “Super Tornado Outbreak” that struck 13 states in the East, South, and Midwest. Before it was over, 330 died and 5,484 were injured in a damage path covering more than 2,500 mi.

    Or that back when the temps were maybe 1 C cooler, 1925 March 18, Mo., Ill., Ind.: the “Tri-State Tornado” was the most violent single twister in U.S. history. It caused the deaths of 695 people and injured over 2,000. Property damage was estimated at $16.5 million.

    The fact is we have had a massive influx of people into tornado prone areas over this last half century, so lots more people and houses are in harms way now.

    Arthur
     
    Last edited: Jun 22, 2011
  11. Believe Happy medium Valued Senior Member

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    No.
     
  12. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    I agree. I said 100 years before the temps are a problem enough for people to go "ops we're fucked".

    My point is 10 years until water and pollution in the waters are enough for people to go "ops we're Fucked". Hence a more desperate and pressing problem.
     
  13. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    Hmmm?

    In 2000, through the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), the international community committed to halving the proportion of people without access to clean water and basic sanitation by 2015. Overall, the world is on track to meet the water MDG.

    http://www.undp.org/water/water-supply-and-sanitation.shtml

    Of course 70% of the people who lack sanitation worldwide live in Asia.

    Arthur
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Forgive me if I've already posted this data on this thread; we usually have two or three going on this topic or related topics. But I recently saw a statistic in the Washington Post, that for the first time since anybody has been keeping track, the poverty rate in Africa has dropped below 50%.

    For decades China competed with Africa for the title of World's Most Desperate People, but it's turned itself around rather efficiently. India was also in the running back in my childhood days, and it too is now on the road to stability and at least modest prosperity. Those two countries together have more than one-third of the world's people, so if those people aren't starving anymore it leaves us with rather a lot of resources to devote to everybody else.

    And look at Vietnam. We almost literally "bombed them back into the Stone Age" by saturating their topsoil with herbicide, yet their economy is now growing at around ten percent per year.
     
  15. Me-Ki-Gal Banned Banned

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    That is a good article Water man. It helps bring awareness to reality . There are many that are worried about the depletion of aquifers though . Ground water depletion due to global warming and over usage by human populations. I don't see it my self . I see year to year fluctuations . See people don't seem to realized rain falls and temperatures are recorded in history independent of scientific study. So they go around saying this year is the hots ever recorded and things like that . California was hot as hell and desert like conditions back before the rivers were tamed for agriculture . The Sacramento river would spread out 2 miles wide when rainy season came and then it would reach temperatures of 113 or more in the summer . Very different than now or even when I grew up there . Very desert like compared to the artificial control of irrigation of the land now drinking up the water . . Now me I think the environment has make adjustment to the new designated use and we are going to find that shutting down certain farm areas will have an abrupt consequence on the new usage , or on interference by human activity . Meaning the adaption of the last 100 or 150 years of adaptable life will now be displaced over life that could not adapt . Not just your alley cats you let go in the wild either . I don't know . I don't do the science . I do know 100 years of precedence and things start a path of adaption to new surroundings . My evidence of this is human activity abandoned 100 years ago . Even 50 years and it is reclaimed in a new form by nature. You got to be a pretty good expert to even tell there was a human disturbance. Hell even ancient presents of humans the expert can tell there was presence, but the layman will walk and walk over the site and think it is just a natural occurrence with out human hands interfering.
     
  16. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993
    The full abstract instead of a cherry-picked piece:

    Abstract. Methane frozen into hydrate makes up a large
    reservoir of potentially volatile carbon below the sea floor
    and associated with permafrost soils. This reservoir intuitively
    seems precarious, because hydrate ice floats in water,
    and melts at Earth surface conditions. The hydrate reservoir
    is so large that if 10% of the methane were released to the atmosphere
    within a few years, it would have an impact on the
    Earth’s radiation budget equivalent to a factor of 10 increase
    in atmospheric CO2.
    Hydrates are releasing methane to the atmosphere today in
    response to anthropogenic warming, for example along the
    Arctic coastline of Siberia. However most of the hydrates
    are located at depths in soils and ocean sediments where anthropogenic
    warming and any possible methane release will
    take place over time scales of millennia. Individual catastrophic
    releases like landslides and pockmark explosions are
    too small to reach a sizable fraction of the hydrates. The
    carbon isotopic excursion at the end of the Paleocene has
    been interpreted as the release of thousands of Gton C, possibly
    from hydrates, but the time scale of the release appears
    to have been thousands of years, chronic rather than catastrophic.
    The potential climate impact in the coming century from
    hydrate methane release is speculative but could be comparable
    to climate feedbacks from the terrestrial biosphere
    and from peat, significant but not catastrophic. On geologic
    timescales, it is conceivable that hydrates could release as
    much carbon to the atmosphere/ocean system as we do by
    fossil fuel combustion.
     
  17. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    What are you claiming was cherry picked?

    The claim was that significant amounts of Hydrates (hence the "we're fucked" implication) would occur within 100 years.
    The paragraph I quoted spoke specifically to that issue, but the other parts of the abstract don't contradict anything I posted.

    The first paragraph says "intuitively this seems precarious"
    The Second Paragraph, (the one I quoted) indicates intuition isn't correct and that it isn't actually precarious because:

    And because:
    The next part simply explains that while there is a lot of methane that could be released, the effects would be
    And further explains the 100 year horizon, dispelling the "we're fucked" claim.

    So nothing in the first or third paragraphs changed the essence of the paragraph I quoted (and I did provide a link to the entire article) which in section 4.1 states:

    Or see table 1 for details.

    Arthur
     
    Last edited: Jun 22, 2011
  18. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993
    Blah, blah, blah....:shrug: Just what I said.
     
  19. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993

    As many, including me have said, life will survive baring complete destruction of the planet and likely even then. It just won't be human life.
     
  20. adoucette Caca Occurs Valued Senior Member

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    7,829
    BS

    You claimed I "Cherry Picked" that quote.

    So WHAT PART of the longer quote you posted contradicts anything in the part I posted?

    Arthur
     
  21. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993
    More blah, blah. Just as I said.
     
  22. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    ***Moderator Note***

    Cherry picking on Wiki
    You are being asked to substantiate your claim that the Arthur's quoted text is contradicted by anything in the you quoted.

    What you are doing now amounts to intellectual dishonesty and trolling.

    Trolling on the grounds that it can obviously only have one eventual effect - provoking a hostile reaction. And intellectual dishonesty on the grounds that you are simply restating your argument (that the quoted text was cherry picked) without addressing the counter argument (that nothing in the text you quoted contradicts the position assigned to the paper by Arthur on the basis of the text he quoted - a contradiction that would be a formal requirement to substantiate the claim of cherry picking).

    Both intellectual dishonesty and trolling have, historicaly, been offenses for which bans have been considered appropriate, so please, substantiate your claim, or retract it.
     
  23. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993
    You are wrong. He quoted only a cherry picked part of the full abstract which supports his limited perspective and knowledge on the topic, not the full and balanced statement of the abstract and the paper as a whole. That is clearly cherry picking and pointing it out is a completely different thing than tolling, I suggest you learn the difference. He clearly just wants to trash up this topic which I started with argueing instead of discussion.
     
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