[HN Gopher] Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as...
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Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important
carbon sink
Author : graderjs
Score : 94 points
Date : 2021-10-17 14:28 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| schiffern wrote:
| >terran
|
| Could we please _not_ alter headlines to replace real words with
| made-up scifi words? The original headline uses "terrestrial,"
| which is correct.
|
| Also even in the context of scifi, "terrestrial" has a completely
| different meaning ("of the land surface", vs "of the planet
| Earth").
|
| Inb4 'all words are made up' etc etc boring thread
|
| Mods, can we get a fix?
|
| EDIT: Thanks!
| grzm wrote:
| The article title is "Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green
| snow algae as important terrestrial carbon sink", which is over
| the 80-character limit for titles. The submitter likely made
| the edit to make the title fit.
|
| If you have better alternative, feel free to suggest one.
|
| Edit to add: the best way to get a title fixed is to (quietly)
| email the mods using the contact link in the footer.
| burnished wrote:
| Drop the word 'green', its an interesting descriptor but
| accuracy wouldn't be lost in the same way (I believe).
| dang wrote:
| That's a good idea. I dropped 'terrestrial' instead,
| because I'm not sure where else the carbon sink would be.
|
| (Submitted title was "Remote sensing shows Antarctic green
| snow algae is important terran carbon sink".)
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| >Inb4 'all words are made up' etc etc boring thread
|
| You admit your point is baseless but haven't internalized it
| emotionally, I guess.
|
| "Terra" is "Earth" in Latin, and "teren" is Romanian for
| "ground". Can't "terran" be a shorthand for "terrESTRIAL" in
| English just because it's the name of a faction in StarCraft?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| watertom wrote:
| It was the rise of phytoplankton that created the atmosphere
| necessary for human life.
|
| It will be the collapse of the phytoplankton that will eliminate
| the the atmosphere necessary for human life.
|
| Humans won't be around to see the planet warm.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| The paper claims the opposite, instead of a collapse of
| phytoplakton there will (likely) be an increase:
|
| > Our study indicates that positive summer temperatures and a
| sufficient nutrient supply are key factors determining the
| present-day distribution of green snow algae on the Antarctic
| Peninsula. With the IPCC's projected 1.5 degC global
| temperature increase, it is predicted that the 0 degC isotherm
| will increase in elevation and that positive degree days will
| become more commonplace and occur further to the south. This
| will likely open up new snow for colonisation by green snow
| algae, should an appropriate dispersal mechanism allow transfer
| to new areas. [...]
|
| > _A warming Peninsula, therefore, may see a shift towards
| fewer, larger snow algae blooms, resulting in a significant
| increase in biomass on larger outlying islands and the
| mainland. The coupled loss of blooms from smaller islands would
| be insignificant with respect to biomass_ and may be mitigated
| by southward range expansion or an earlier growth season.
| However, with multiple and often unknown species recorded
| within patches of green snow algae, and little known about the
| dispersal mechanisms, life cycles and plasticity of snow algal
| species, losses from these islands could represent a reduction
| of terrestrial diversity for the Antarctic Peninsula.
| twofornone wrote:
| When we discover novel failure points in the complex, chaotic
| global climate system about once a year, why are you so sure
| that there aren't undiscovered biologic or geologic climate
| regulating mechanisms that will buffer the geologically recent
| greenhouse spike and maintain a livable temperature range?
|
| That's the danger of a rigid, politically enforced orthodoxy.
| Your research becomes extremely one sided. And in a non-
| empirical field your speculation can go pretty far off into the
| deep end before you're proven wrong; especially when all of
| your predictions require hundreds of years to measure with any
| certainty.
|
| Life has persisted through dozens (if not hundreds) of climate
| disturbances, and even though temperature swings look like
| blips when plotted, they most likely occur over hundreds-
| thousands of years. There are proposed mechanisms by which a
| sudden global temperature increase may in fact trigger an ice
| age through various geologic or globally biologic phenomena.
| You wont see much published on that side of the climate
| conjecture, but a lack of literature in the modern research
| climate does not imply invalidity.
| ahevia wrote:
| This is unnecessary doomerism. Yes our situation is not exactly
| the brightest but is doomposting on HN really the best action
| you can take?
|
| Humans will still be around to see the planet warm. The
| question is will individuals & society band together to limit
| that warming & adapt?
| wsjtho55 wrote:
| Is trying to "correct" doomposting on HN with poetic trifles
| the best action you can take?
|
| Useless rhetoric online sure requires a lot of computers.
|
| Band with society to use them less disposably.
| adflux wrote:
| The main problem with doomtalk is the defeatist attitude that
| usually accompanies it. Utterly useless way of thinking
| rc_mob wrote:
| First step to solving a problem is acknowledging that the
| problem exists. It feels like you have yet to take that first
| step.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| No, they did take that step. But the very next step is
| correctly scoping the problem. It's the one at which so
| many people fail.
| ripper1138 wrote:
| Ridiculous. Humans burning fossil fuel for 200 years is nothing
| compared to the mass extinctions that have occurred in the
| past, and yet the atmosphere is still here.
| hiidrew wrote:
| Thought this was referring to remote viewing
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing) for a second haha
| billiam wrote:
| While this paper is interesting for identifying an interesting
| relatively unstudied carbon sink, I am confident no one on this
| website, including me, is in a good position to understand all
| the implications of it. I found the conclusions to be pretty
| complex and speculative. All in all, all it shows is that we have
| no idea what's going to happen and when.
| billiam wrote:
| While this paper is interesting for identifying an interesting
| relatively unstudied carbon sink, I am confident no one on this
| website, including me, is in a good position to understand all
| the implications of it. I found the conclusions to be pretty
| complex and speculative. All in all, all it shows is that we have
| no idea what's going to happen and when.
| atoav wrote:
| We are doomed. But on the other hand we created a lot of value
| for the shareholders for a few decades.
| _3u10 wrote:
| The report says the total biomass is 1300 tonnes. (1.3x10^3). I
| think the algae might be less important than the authors are
| letting on.
| civilized wrote:
| To anyone who is gearing up to doompost: the abstract says this
| is likely a _negative_ feedback counteracting warming and carbon
| rise.
| parksy wrote:
| In which case I would have to take a step back and think about
| the world for a bit. Is there a possibility when it gets warmer
| / more carbon rich, the carbon-hungry microbes go to town,
| reducing temperatures (*eventually, maybe not over time periods
| important to humans?)
|
| If the world's microbiome is geared to maintaining (rather than
| merely existing in / responding to) temperatures and
| atmospheric gas ratios within a fine margin that would be
| noteworthy.
|
| I've probably drunk too much and it's too late at night for
| this conversation to be honest. I probably shouldn't have even
| pressed "reply".
| labster wrote:
| The thing is there are hundreds of negative and positive
| feedbacks, and they're all modeled by people whose job is to
| think of these things. You are not going to think of
| something novel unless you are an expert in a related field.
| Your curiosity is not a bad thing. As a climatologist I've
| heard so many versions of "climate models don't account for
| X" where X has been modeled since the 1980s that it just kind
| of triggers me.
|
| The error bars of the IPCC report are our best guess on what
| we think we know about uncertainty. Sure, we could end up
| outside of it, on some heretofore unknown feedback, but it's
| like betting our collective future on a longshot horse. The
| same applies to the assuming it will be much worse.
| ahevia wrote:
| This is a good question! And it's clear youre not asking this
| in bad faith (the line of thinking that CO2 is good for
| humanity & the planet is a common climate misinformation
| tactic)
|
| I'm not an expert on this stuff but from what I've read over
| the course of millennium. The Earth will achieve balance
| again (assuming no further human intervention)
|
| For all practical reasons that won't work for us. Using
| microbes as a carbon removal solution is a real potential
| solution! Specifically using microbes in place of fertilizers
| as a technique to improve soil health (which would increase
| soil organic carbon). Although it's not 100% clear how well
| that carbon will be stored for the long term.
|
| I'm oversimplifying the science no doubt but we can harness
| microbes to our benefit.
| parksy wrote:
| No for sure I'm strongly of the mind that greenhouse gases
| do their job in creating a greenhouse, which increases
| temperature over time (which means more energy in the
| global system, which means everything from stronger storms
| to longer droughts...)
|
| As a layperson I've read about the Vostok cores and
| understand how closely correlated CO2 concentrations and
| dust are as proxies for global temperature. Also I've read
| up on how phytoplankton essentially are the reason we have
| oxygen to breathe, so there are risks like ocean
| acidification that could kill us all regardless of
| temperature.
|
| If some of those little buggers can give us an out or at
| least give us a longer grace period to sort our stuff out,
| I want in.
| parksy wrote:
| (edit: but I almost forgot - it would be mindblowing if
| it turned out the Earth was somehow tuned to bring itself
| back to some average. The millions of different chemical
| combinations and seasonal variations all mediated by the
| ecosystem - which seems rather fragile but what if it was
| brutally rigid. I guess it's had a couple of billion
| years to gear itself up?)
| pjc50 wrote:
| It basically already _is_ tuned to maintain an average,
| just as a buffer solution can oppose changes in pH. It
| maintains a temperature level above what we 'd otherwise
| expect, and our unnatural oxygen atmosphere.
|
| If we do nothing, it is unlikely to run away, but it will
| take rather longer than a human timescale to put it back
| to a comfortable level, and there could be a lot of
| damage over the next century.
| waserwill wrote:
| Anything that needs carbon in its metabolism will,
| naturally, use what's available.
|
| Biological systems are tricky, though. If you dump a huge
| amount of fruit into a forest, the animals will eat it
| and grow in number; then, so will their predators.
| Animals who don't eat the fruit but are eaten by the
| predators will be in a bad spot. That leads to
| consequences all over the food web. Plus, dumping large
| amounts every year also changes the soil chemistry and
| changes what grows there.
|
| Similarly, higher CO2 decreases water pH (more acidic)
| and can cause fast-growing algae to bloom (which
| decreases light penetration to the water beneath, and the
| algae may produce toxins).
|
| Even when high-level equilibria are reached (which they
| eventually would, one way or another), they won't
| necessarily be the same or come pleasantly.
| shawn-butler wrote:
| It's 100% clear that carbon doesn't persist in the soil.
| It's make believe unsupported by any evidence
| ahevia wrote:
| No that's just not true. Carbon does persist in soil. For
| how long is a very different question.
|
| Once Soil Organic Carbon is converted to Microbial
| Organic Matter it is much more robust.
|
| But the threats that climate change bring also threaten
| the stability of land ecosystems (drought, increased
| forest fires, etc) which will release the carbon stored
| in the soil.
|
| So we shouldn't rely on soil alone to sequester
| carbon(nor should it make up the bulk of our
| sequestration portfolio), but to claim it doesn't persist
| in soil is a false statement.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Good question. I think at the very least it shows that in a
| highly complex systems with many components unknown to us it
| is very difficult to predict the future. We shouldn't stop
| trying though and update our models accordingly.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| You have touched on the property about systems that people
| don't really internalize well. When you're inside and part of
| a system and perturb it, the impact of the perturbation may
| activate parts of the system that you were unaware existed.
|
| But it is also true that if you say, "Climate change is
| really only a big deal for the currently dominant flora and
| fauna, the planet as an ecosystem has been in many different
| states from ice ball to volcanic hell hole." :-) In geologic
| time it doesn't "matter" at all.
|
| It is a good paper, and I've added it to the list of things
| that are changing that may influence climate changes (another
| is what happens with cloud formation when we have more
| moisture in the air due to rising atmospheric average
| temperatures, the IPCC model gives one result if we get more
| stratospheric clouds, and another if we get more clouds in
| the troposphere.)
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| Also, we aren't necessarily doomed if we were willing to
| actually try anything.
|
| No one wants to try nuclear for reals because people are
| frightened of it and world governments don't have an economic
| interest in building more nuclear.
|
| We don't have an equivalent of an "operation warp speed" for
| developing next-gen CO2 scrubbing technology. I guess that's
| just not as cool to people as building tunnels under LA or
| launching cars into space.
|
| Speaking of algae, we're not turning wasteland into algae
| farming ponds and developing more useful algae because, well, I
| don't really know. Even with CRISPR-Cas9 being in relative
| infancy, GMO algae seems like a low hanging fruit for not only
| removing carbon from the atmosphere but being a food source in
| places around the world where food is scarce. I mean, as an
| individual you can buy a kit that has what you need to
| genetically modify yeast to glow with jellyfish genes, so how
| far off are we from making species like chlorella more
| practical? Maybe it's because nobody wants to eat pond scum.
|
| All I know is that the amount of effort we are putting into
| these solutions, although there is _some_ effort in each of
| them, really doesn 't add up to the message we are being told
| about climate change. It's both extremely disappointing and
| cause for raised eyebrows.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > No one wants to try nuclear for reals because people are
| frightened of it and world governments don't have an economic
| interest in building more nuclear
|
| Well it's also worth noting that it's become like that
| because of the oil lobby's decades of scaremongering and the
| oversupply of natural gas which makes those plants the most
| profitable choice.
|
| But still it's mostly a NIMBY problem. If smaller, mass
| produced, gen 4 reactors could be set up in some uninhabited
| areas we'd basically solve all that.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The algae thing has been trialled; it turns out to have lots
| of fiddly little practical problems, and is reliant on fresh
| water like other farming.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3152439/
| bertil wrote:
| > Also, we aren't necessarily doomed if we were willing to
| actually try anything.
|
| I maintain that, given how the majority of tax rebates and
| financial aid is still going to fossil fuels, unless we kick
| people out of that option for good, they will latch to the
| last dollar of subsidy or political donation until human life
| on Earth is beyond hope. The only way to kickstart changes
| and investments is to put executives in front a judge for the
| mass murders that are already well documented and be clear
| that they will be held responsible for the millions of deaths
| related to unusual climate events.
|
| How did we stop populist from legally raising to position of
| power against after the 1940s? Nuremberg and Tokyo trials.
| Climate disruption is a much bigger threat and needs a
| gesture at least as big.
| hummel wrote:
| I'm working on this direction, with an very specific seaweed
| that solve this problem now and doesn't need freshwater or
| fertilizers. If anyone is interested reach me on my profile.
| webreac wrote:
| Nuclear is not dead: French President Emmanuel Macron
| announced a shift to small modular nuclear reactors
| https://www.france24.com/en/france/20211013-france-
| unveils-n...
| RealityVoid wrote:
| There have also been several articles on HN about his exact
| topic lately. I think this reaction is based on the current
| energy crysis and it seems to force things to move along
| moffkalast wrote:
| Fuck yeah, IKEA reactors for the win!
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > Speaking of algae, we're not turning wasteland into algae
| farming ponds and developing more useful algae because, well,
| I don't really know.
|
| One of the reasons is that, according to many environmental
| activists, there is no such thing as "wasteland" that you
| could develop with minimal loss to environment. This is not a
| theoretical concern: read up on Ivanpah solar power plant,
| built in the middle of the literal desert, the place as
| deserving the designation of "wasteland" as any other place
| in the US. Activists forced the developers to spend tens of
| millions of dollars on relocating the desert tortoises living
| in that wasteland, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of
| dollars per tortoise - and that's not even including the
| litigation costs. This also resulted in reduction of scope of
| the plant, reducing the total installed capacity, and
| reducing the amount of carbon-free energy we will get out of
| it.
|
| The lesson here is that if the environmental activists are
| not happy about building solar power plant in the middle of
| remote desert, they won't be happy about building literally
| anything else. They're totally BANANAs: Build Absolutely
| Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
| _3u10 wrote:
| Dude in BC they pretend a pod of orcas is a separate
| species because orcas aren't endangered so they had to
| invent a species with 73 members so they could have
| something to complain about.
|
| Look up Southern Resident Orca
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Dude in BC they pretend a pod of orcas is a separate
| species because orcas aren't endangered so they had to
| invent a species with 73 members so they could have
| something to complain about.
|
| Sometimes scientists do genetic analysis and find things,
| yep.
|
| We don't do this because we are drama queens, It just
| happens that murica has some unique cetacean species and
| they are experiencing a sharp decline by unclear reasons.
| Some people repeating the same stupid jokes about
| activists since 1960's don't help to provide any
| solution.
|
| All seen the same to you? Can you spot the differences?
|
| https://cdn.roaring.earth/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/01/Killer_...
| [deleted]
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