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Does the Amazon provide 20% of our oxygen?
- crb002 7y agoGuessing a lot is ocean based, and plants are more efficient at getting it with higher concentrations.
- wcunning 7y agoThe 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.
- amelius 7y ago> a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces. Especially when on fire ...
- molteanu 7y agoThis 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.
- dev_dull 7y agoYou’re being downvoted, but it clearly is a political move. The fires aren’t even outside of the average and already countries are applying political pressure on the president. When the facts are detached from the narrative, it’s usually a political story.
- Bjartr 7y agoI heard the fires were up by 87% from last year, no matter the base rate, nearly double seems to qualify as "outside the average"
- alacombe 7y agoNot according to NASA... https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-brazil https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145464/fires-in-bra...
- skosch 7y agoThat article is from over a week ago, and it cites http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon, which has since been updated. Indeed, people are burning more this year than they did in the past few years – any burning at all has always been unacceptable, but if the current spike is what it takes to finally create some international outrage and put pressure on Bolsonaro, then I'll gladly take it.
- gus_massa 7y ago> any burning at all has always been unacceptable It's a traditional farming practice that has been used all over the word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn The idea is that you can burn a small place, cultivate it for a few years and then abandon it so the natural grow of the forest regenerate it. And some years later repeat the cicle. When the population is small it's fine because the time between burn and burn was enough for the soil and forest to recover. When the population increase the time gets too small and the forest has not enough tome to recover, and after a few cicles you have problems like reduction of fertility, erosion and desertification.
- ctrl-j 7y agoI mean.. I get your point.. but 9% is still a lot, and even if it's net-zero, the carbon sequestration going into that process can't be negligible. It may be a click-bait factoid, but it's not like that factoid isn't an important one.
- Misdicorl 7y agoThere 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
- cm2187 7y agoBut doesn't it regrow from the hashes?
- Misdicorl 7y agoEventually. See my other comment
- marvin 7y agoFrom the ashes? Not if it's turned into a ranch! 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.
- cm2187 7y agoWell my question is rather if it becomes a growing forest again, ie capturing co2.
- didbsivdf 7y ago“Not if it's turned into a ranch!” That’s not obvious to me. Most plants are C2 plants, but grass is a C4 so it captures sunlight more efficiently. Not to say burning the Amazon isn’t a terrible idea.
- bad_user 7y agoNetflix 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.
- Retric 7y agoThere is no single tipping point. There are a vast number of different tipping points with different outcomes.
- zaroth 7y agoWhich is to say, there is no tipping point?
- Retric 7y agoMore 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.
- BurningFrog 7y agoThere is this idea that the ecological balance is very fragile and easily destroyed. This is true, in a way, but it doesn't mean nature will dies. It almost always just means that nature will find a new ecological balance.
- bad_user 7y agoIf nature finds a new ecological balance that's incompatible with human life, does it matter?
- majos 7y agoI 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.
- liability 7y ago> 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.
- gamblor956 7y agoThat is extremely unusual since besides generally require release forms from people in the pictures they run.
- Monroe13 7y agoIn the US at least, no release form is required of those pictured in a news article.
- gamblor956 7y ago
- mycall 7y agoO2/CO2 aside, the Amazon rainforest's biodiversity is unique and has been a source for medical resource. There is more at stake than just breathing.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoI 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?
- ramphastidae 7y agoQuinine for one. There are many more if you are willing to do five minutes of research: https://www.conservation.org/blog/5-rainforest-species-that-could-save-your-life https://www.conservation.org/blog/5-rainforest-species-that-...
- darkerside 7y agoIt'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.
- mehrdadn 7y ago> 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] [1] https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=drugs+from+the+amazon https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=drugs+from+the+ama... [2] https://www.adventure-life.com/amazon/articles/medicinal-treasures-of-the-rainforest https://www.adventure-life.com/amazon/articles/medicinal-tre...
- ngold 7y agoSo yes or no does the amazon provide 20% or not?
- shkkmo 7y agoTLDR: 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.
- badrabbit 7y ago"...consumes about as much oxygen as it produces." If it burns,there will be leftover life that will no longer be supported by the amazon. Causing a significant increase in net Oxygen consumption. 1% uncomoemsated consumption doesn't sound like much but it will remain that way or worse whic means total O2 will continue to deplete.
- strainer 7y agoThe 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. .... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209592731830375X#f0020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209592731...
- BurningFrog 7y agoLet's demystify how plants "produce oxygen". 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis
- EB66 7y ago> 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.
- smadge 7y agoI 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.
- luckylion 7y agoThat'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.
- smadge 7y agoI am not excusing the statistic. I think people should be accurate. To me the correct statistic is just as compellingly.
- wodenokoto 7y agoConsumes 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.
- Merovius 7y ago> 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…
- jefftk 7y agoThe article is making a much stronger claim: > the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world's oxygen is effectively zero If this is correct, then the entire Amazon could vanish without having any effect on CO₂ levels.
- chewbacha 7y agoIt 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.
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago> Second, a bigger point that is often missed is that the Amazon consumes about as much oxygen as it produces." Does this mean that if the Amazon rainforest fell off of the map tomorrow, life as we know it would pretty much stay the same/be ok?
- bendbro 7y agoThis whole "RAINFOREST IS ON FIRE" meme reminds me a lot of Kony 2012.
- thepangolino 7y agoExactly. It’s highlights a real issue but completely misplaces mobilisation.
- RandomBacon 7y agoBut then you get the people that say, "At least they're doing something."
- jdnenej 7y agoWell wtf can anyone really do about a disaster on the other side of the world.
- pas 7y agoProbably 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.
- tcgv 7y agoThis 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] [1] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=pt&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fg1.globo.com%2Ffato-ou-fake%2Fnoticia%2F2019%2F08%2F22%2Fveja-o-que-e-fato-ou-fake-sobre-as-queimadas-na-amazonia.ghtml&sandbox=1 http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=pt&tl=en&u=http...
- dev_dull 7y agoIt’s almost like these people are more interested in pushing a narrative and not the facts?
- m0zg 7y agoAll 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.
- ignoramous 7y agoAgree. 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.
- palisade 7y agoMore importantly as the planet's "lungs" the Amazon filters a great quantity of carbon dioxide from the air.
- m0zg 7y agoI 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.
- sp332 7y agoWhere did you see that figure?
- m0zg 7y agohttps://newscenter.lbl.gov/2019/08/20/amazon-rainforest-absorbing-less-carbon-than-expected/ https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2019/08/20/amazon-rainforest-abso... 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."
- shkkmo 7y agoThis 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.
- jamesdmiller 7y agoWhere do they put it? Wouldn't this require the total biomass of the rainforest to be continually increasing?
- povertyworld 7y agoI 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?
- Misdicorl 7y agoThis is not true for rainforests afaik. There is no fire cycle like for the mountain forests of the US West
- chrisco255 7y agoThis 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).
- sp332 7y agoThese 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.
- pvaldes 7y ago> 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.
- BurningFrog 7y agoWhat you need to know: This has zero impact on oxygen levels. It might be a real problem for CO₂. Anyway, the geological history of oxygen is pretty wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- zests 7y agoWhat 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.
- luckylion 7y agoI 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.
- pas 7y agoSimply share the fact you know, be prepared to explain how you know that it's reliable, what are the implications of the difference. In my experience people listen to people who can explain things, not just claim that something is wrong/false.
- sabujp 7y agoYou 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?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- diego_moita 7y agoNo, it doesn't provide. But the article totally misses the issue of carbon capture.
- paggle 7y ago20% of sequestered carbon dioxide is in the Amazon. If it burns to the ground then that CO2 will be released. It doesn’t affect oxygen levels.
- ridgeguy 7y agoIsn't it 20% of sequestered carbon, not CO2? Burning that carbon to CO2 requires oxygen, which will deplete the atmospheric reservoir to some degree.
- paggle 7y agoBut isn’t there oxygen in the organic materials of the tree?
- ridgeguy 7y agoI 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.
- higherkinded 7y agoWrong Amazon, you again!
- _emacsomancer_ 7y agoEventually Amazon may provide 20% of our oxygen....
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DenisM 7y agoA 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.
- justanothernoob 7y agoYou 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.
- crimsonalucard 7y agoA forest of constant size is not growing and therefore not removing any carbon from the air is this persons argument.
- crimsonalucard 7y agohttps://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats/other_threats/oil_and_gas_extraction_amazon/ https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/ama... 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?
- d0100 7y agoEven if it did, all these EU colonialists using the Amazon as a red herring because things aren't going well back home should first stop destroying the other 80% with their industrialization and irresponsible consumerism. Macron: "We the G7, the most industrialized and polluting nations, should gang up on this up and coming 3rd world country. Look at my might!!" Go wave a white flag Macron
- dredmorbius 7y agoWhat impressed me most from this article was the gross primary productivity map (http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/uploads/1/8/7/6/18767612/screenshot-2019-08-24-at-06-31-02_orig.png http://www.yadvindermalhi.org/uploads/1/8/7/6/18767612/scree...), showing plant activity by region. 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: https://invidio.us/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE https://invidio.us/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE
- m3kw9 7y agoAmazon sells oxygen canisters?
- dvduval 7y agoSo 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.
- EGreg 7y agoI have a question about trees: 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?
- gus_massa 7y agoOversimplifiying: 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.)
- squirrelicus 7y agotl;dr the rule holds, the answer is no. :] Though i have to admit to bring skeptical of his analysis that suggests the rainforest is a net zero on oxygen production.
- gdubs 7y agoThis 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.
- amriksohata 7y agoWhat 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
- diedyesterday 7y agoA 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.