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https://youtu.be/v_XigW2QcB4?si=hiHJPjk5zhosEDfN
Recent paper on Dark O2
polymetalic nodules, in the deep sea, also in deep lakes where the plates are splitting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlrHPycKKQ0&t=35s
It would seem that the main reason for mining these polymetalic nodules is for gaining minerals to manufacture EV batteries to mitigate global warming. Also for some to make a lot of money.
Yet by mining these polymetalic nodules, they maybe putting all life on the planet in danger.
This might be the most important scientific discovery – ever. I imagine that continental drift – plate tectonics, plays a substantial role.
I heard many, many, decades ago that complex life would most likely not have happened on Earth, if we did not have plate tectonics.
This is the deep time recycling of Carbon. As the oceanic plates are subsumed beneath the continental plates, Carbon is stored deep in the Earth for a long time, that Carbon is returned to the atmosphere through earthquakes, volcanoes and other processes. I also heard, again, many decades ago, that when the last volcano stops venting, that will be the countdown for most of life to die, as Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced to such an extent that plant life could no longer thrive. In the oceans where the plates are splitting hot chemical fluids come up from deep beneath, these fluids are mineral rich. Around black smokers there is an abundance of life, that life stays in a small zone, not too close so it burns, not too far away that it gets to cold to function. The new theory might suggest that deep sea Oxygen might have allowed complex life to have got going in the deep, dark, cold ocean, some time before photosynthesis made enough free oxygen available in the photic zone for complex life to take hold.
Fascinating and incredibly important. EV vehicles are not the answer, they may be the most terrible “solution”.Nitrosopumilus maritimus
Nitrogen/Oxygen producing Archaea in the deep Oceans.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220106143640.htm#:~:text=Researchers%20already%20knew%20that%20the,the%20production%20of%20gasous%20nitrogen.
“Researchers already knew that the ammonia oxidizing archaea are microorganisms, that keep the global nitrogen cycle going, but they were not aware of the full extent of their capabilities.In the newly discovered pathway, Nitrosopumilus maritimus couples the oxygen production to the production of gasous nitrogen.
By doing so they remove bioavailable nitrogen from the environment.”
It seems these Archaea can also produce small amounts of Oxygen.
When you consider the impacts on marine life from human activity over the last 50 years, it would be wise to leave the oceans alone from further exploitation and pollution.
I agree, Shibboleth.
The metal nodules on ocean floor/metal crusts on sea mounts, seem to be assisting the deep sea critters to obtain Oxygen.
They might have been doing that for a billion years. Why should the sudden rush for battery cars upset that long-term ecosystem.
EV will not save the planet.
However some people will exploit the world to get very rich, no matter how much harm they do.
We should know better by now.Dave Borlace at “Just have a think” channel on YT is all about this topic this week entitled “Nature’s batteries at the bottom of the ocean.”
“The aviation industry is estimated to produce around 2% of global Carbon dioxide emissions”
It would seem that regular flyers use up more than their share of Carbon.
Most humans, never fly.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czrjzvep41ro
“Air New Zealand has abandoned a 2030 goal to cut its carbon emissions, blaming difficulties securing more efficient planes and sustainable jet fuel.The move makes it the first major carrier to back away from such a climate target.”
We have been told that Global Warming is an existential threat to humanity, yet we have wars and more wars using up natural and human resources.
The aviation industry pays no tax on aviation fuel.If Global Warming is such a threat to continued health and wellbeing of humanity, perhaps we should have less flying and less wars?
Hats off to the denialists! Their spreading of doubt and delay has allowed government inaction to get us to this point:
https://climate.copernicus.eu/new-record-daily-global-average-temperature-reached-july-2024
Three new hottest days on Earth ever recorded, just this month.
In addition, last June was the hottest June on record, marking 13 successive months in which each month was the hottest ever recorded for that corresponding month.
Well done, denialists. Big Oil is surely proud of you.
I expect global heating to accelerate. Emissions have consistently accelerated and there’s a delay before their effect shows up as increased temperature. Even if all emissions stopped today, global average temperature would continue to rise for some years. And that’s before we include “termination shock” – Google it.
Beyond fucked, as we say in XR.
I fear exaggeration, even scaremongering, practiced by – of all people – scientists during the Covid period has shattered their cedibility among many ordinary citizens and those who might have been skeptical but undecided on the climate issue. They now see it as another scham. And political elites are doing their utmost to profit off this negligence and disappointment. Horrifying behaviour. Especially by our German Green party who have had such a popular impact in the 1980s and 1990s. Most idiotic of all – had they abandoned their jingoism over Ukaine and Gaza, their self-righteousness over “minority rights” they could have laid a serious foundation for substantial long-term power. So they not only fucked over others, they hurt their very own (even though latter distinction won´t matter once the system switches into permanent emergency mode.)
book review:
“Climate Change and International History. Negotiating Science, Global Change, and Environmental Justice”
by Morgan, Ruth A.New Approaches to International History
London 2024: Bloomsburyconclusion:
“(…)However, therein lies the essence and purpose of Ruth Morgan’s book. It does not seek to simplify the course of events, but rather to portray the diverse nature of climate negotiations beyond diplomacy as conventionally understood. The book shows how these negotiations intertwine with a wide variety of interests and are influenced by a multitude of factors. The author’s main contribution to the field is her presentation of a multidimensional narrative that integrates and contextualizes such a vast and complex subject. This ensures that the book will occupy a prominent place in the historiography of climate change.(…)”
AG – “I fear exaggeration, even scaremongering, practiced by – of all people – scientists during the Covid period…”
AG, I was not aware of such exaggeration. However, discussion here would be off-topic, so please see my new comment on the covid thread, here.
I would like to ask what people think a changing “warming” climate will mean for increased temperature in a pristine tropical rainforest. Decades ago we were told that, at or near sea level, the temperature in a tropical rainforest stayed the same at 88 degrees Fahrenheit. If the forest was cut down, then the temperature would change – a lot. The pristine rainforest essentially controlled its own temperature. We have been told that in a warming climate, the temperature near the poles will increase a lot but not much increase around the equator? So is it thought that in a warming world the temperature in the equatorial regions will not change much because of the equatorial forests or is there some other theory?
Equatorial regions receive more direct sun heating the air which rises then flows polward.
Michael, very briefly and from memory, the scientific consensus is that a bit more heating would turn certain forests from net carbon sinks into net carbon emitters – if it gets hot and dry enough, that’s obviously the case, but I think it happens before that point. Bad news, a vicious cycle, as I think you have just suggested.
I was hoping for more personal views, not just what scientific consensus has claimed.
Only recently we have been told a lot, that scuppers known consensus.
Like Dark Oxygen.
Like more Carbon held in the soils than is in the atmosphere.
Like Archaea, perhaps, being 50% of the mass of life in the oceans.
The equatorial forests not only control their own temperatures, essentially they control everything, they hold almost all their biomass/Carbon in living tissue or only recently deceased biomass, very little in the soil.
If you clear fell a rainforest, there is not much soil. Very quickly the humidity and the temperature become unstable.
It was the living rainforest, working like a giant organism, that held it all together. The rainforest is not degraded by climate change. The rainforest is degraded because people want it gone, so they can make quick profit to open cast Copper mine, to “help” the energy transition. Or to extract Lithium or Tin or whatever is flavour of the month. I doubt those open cast Copper mines will return to equatorial rainforest, any time soon. Bad Land use will probably turn out to be the biggest part of global warming rather than elevated Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.Michael, can you point to some information about tropical forests controlling their own temperatures and how that occurs?
Also, I don’t think “dark oxygen” scuppers anything, it’s a discovery of something new and additional.Over the last 30-40 years NASA has come to understand that the earth is greening.
Some of this, like in India and China and U.S.A. is because of modern farming methods.
Some is because of extra Carbon dioxde in the atmosphere and further human efforts, like choosing to plant forests in dry areas. They have found that green leaf coverage has grown a lot. As there is a lot more Carbon dioxide in the soils and land biomass than is in the atmosphere, perhaps it would not be unreasonable to assume that more Carbon is being drawn out of the atmosphere, as the world gets more green. Perhaps the world will not get much warmer than 2.5 degrees C pre-industrial, perhaps we may have been over alarmed. Humans are very good at adapting. Also it seems the biomass is adapting quite quickly.Michael:
– “I was hoping for more personal views, not just what scientific consensus has claimed.”
Sorry; I am still too busy to spend sufficient time composing comments, and I owe AG a long reply on the covid thread. But ET’s point is valid; discoveries like dark oxygen rarely overturn a scientific consensus – it does happen sometimes, pyroclastic flows and plate tectonics being two examples that come to mind – but more usually a new discovery modifies and becomes integrated into the existing consensus, e.g. helicobacter pylori as a cause of stomach ulcers. But because I know little about tropical rain forests, seeking out the current majority scientific positions about them would be my starting point anyway. My existing impressions of that are in agreement with your own position – tropical rain forests stabilise temperature, moisture and soil, and support great biodiversity, and the accelerating destruction of them is dangerously ecocidal and should be a crime. Privately, the scientists who study the Amazonian rain forest are saying that it is already past its tipping point, turning it from a net absorber of carbon dioxide to a net emitter.
– “Perhaps the world will not get much warmer than 2.5 degrees C pre-industrial…”
Plus 2.5 degrees C is predicted to be catastrophic, and likely to trigger tipping points causing further rapid heating. Already, at just plus 1.3 degrees C, we are seeing vast wildfires which of course add to atmospheric carbon dioxide in a vicious cycle, increasing and unprecedented flooding, killer heatwaves, and near total loss of arctic sea ice.
Humans and other organisms are good at adapting, but consider this. Humans have built around four hundred nuclear power reactors on the coasts near sea level, each one containing nearly as much radioactive material as would likely be released in a global nuclear war. These reactors are supplying around 10% of humanity’s electricity. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are destabilising much faster than anticipated, so sea level rise will accelerate. But this is just one of millions of disasters waiting to happen that humanity has built; when the 2011 tsunami hit Japan, the radioactive contamination from three meltdowns at Fukushima were actually only a minor part of the ecological devastation unleashed; the backwash washed much of the coastal chemical industry back into the Pacific causing an enormous die-off of marine life.
– “…perhaps we may have been over alarmed.”
Who do you mean by ‘we’, and who do you think may have been over alarming us?
OK TEDI mine in the rainforest on the island of New Guinea
once consider the largest Copper mine in the world.
Before mining operations, Mount Fubilan was described as a copper mountain with a gold cap. Exploratory drilling in the area began in the 1970s. BHP began exploiting the gold cap by using cyanide extraction procedures. After the gold deposit was depleted,the company surveyed for mining the much larger copper deposit underneath. At that time, this deposit was believed to be the largest copper deposit in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_rainforest#/media/File:OkTediMine.jpg
So, that part of the New Guinea rainforest is not being destroyed by climate change but by mineral extraction.Ok Tedi environmental disaster
The Ok Tedi environmental disaster caused severe harm to the environment along 1,000 km (620 mi) of the Ok Tedi River and the Fly River in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea between around 1984 and 2013 and ongoing. The lives of 50,000 people have been disrupted. One of the worst environmental disasters caused by humans, it is a consequence of the discharge of about two billion tons of untreated mining waste into the Ok Tedi from the Ok Tedi Mine,
an open pit mine situated in the province.This mining pollution, caused by the collapse of the Ok Tedi tailings dam system in 1984 and the consequent switch to riverine disposal (disposal of tailings directly into the river) for several decades, was the subject of class action litigation brought by local landowners naming Ok Tedi Mining and BHP Billiton.
You could not really make this stuff up.
However, if we are to have the full experience of an all electric future, this sort of thing will happen again and again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ok_Tedi_environmental_disasterMichael, I again reiterate my agreement that mining is very destructive. But who did you mean by ‘we’, and who did you think may have been over alarming us? This is a discussion forum. Please discuss.
Paul Bell has just been sentenced to 22 months imprisonment for taking action with Just Stop Oil. Paul Bell is a climate scientist; in April he said:
– ” I have taken action in a desperate attempt to protect those I love and everyone else from the alarming future that is being left for young people like me. In my PhD I spend my time studying the impacts of the climate crisis, surrounded by some of the world’s top climate scientists.
– Every day I learn more about this crisis and every day my heart breaks, because I understand how vast the gap is between a safe future and the nightmare future we are heading towards. Scientists must sound the alarm, we cannot continue quietly letting the UK Government twist our words and ignore our warnings.
– As a climate scientist I am hugely worried about the brutal climate disaster that is coming down the line. As a young person I feel betrayed and angry. The Government is burning our future in a dumpster fire of new oil and gas projects, they must be held to account for this monstrous act of genocide.”
Hi Clark, I posted a long reply to you but it seems to have gone into the ether.
Possibly I did not post my name after using a cleaner.
michaelHello Michael, I’m sorry to hear that your reply disappeared. The same has happened to me so many times over the years that I eventually got into the habit of highlighting (right click then “select all”) and copying my entire post each time before I click ‘Submit’, so that if it were to vanish I could just paste it back into the comment form. Unfortunately, our sysadmin has found that site security cannot be reduced or the forums get overwhelmed with spam.
