The 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.
> 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…
I 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.
The 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. ....
I 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.
Netflix 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.
Consumes 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.
This 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.
This 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]
All 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.
Regarding the pictures, many pictures of burning forests were shared on social networks those past few days (eg. Instagram stories).
Those are images of fires to illustrate people's message, they convey the greater concept that we should be aware of the Earth as a global shared system. No one is saying 'look at this picture of the Amazon burning right now' (not even in the Macron's tweet).
Regarding "the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen", I guess it could be debated, and the biodiversity would probably have been a better argument.
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:
What 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.
I 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.
A 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.
>>>A few comments are saying that forests capture a lot of CO2.
As you indicate, those people are incorrect. But a forest may contain a lot of C02, such that burning it all at once increases the amount in the atmosphere noticeably.
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?
You 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.
I 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?
> 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.
A 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.
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?
Oversimplifiying: 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.)
What 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
This 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.
I 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.
[+] [-] wcunning|6 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] Merovius|6 years ago|reply
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…
[+] [-] mycall|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majos|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] strainer|6 years ago|reply
> 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/S209592731...
[+] [-] smadge|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_user|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] amelius|6 years ago|reply
Especially when on fire ...
[+] [-] wodenokoto|6 years ago|reply
If it is the latter, then we will see decreased oxygen levels as the forest decreases is size.
[+] [-] badrabbit|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MuffinFlavored|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ctrl-j|6 years ago|reply
It may be a click-bait factoid, but it's not like that factoid isn't an important one.
[+] [-] ngold|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] molteanu|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tcgv|6 years ago|reply
[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=pt&tl=en&u=http...
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antpls|6 years ago|reply
Those are images of fires to illustrate people's message, they convey the greater concept that we should be aware of the Earth as a global shared system. No one is saying 'look at this picture of the Amazon burning right now' (not even in the Macron's tweet).
Regarding "the Amazon provides 20% of our oxygen", I guess it could be debated, and the biodiversity would probably have been a better argument.
[+] [-] dev_dull|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] zests|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckylion|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pas|6 years ago|reply
In my experience people listen to people who can explain things, not just claim that something is wrong/false.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
Anyway, the geological history of oxygen is pretty wild:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geological_history_of_oxygen
[+] [-] bendbro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepangolino|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DenisM|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] patmcc|6 years ago|reply
As you indicate, those people are incorrect. But a forest may contain a lot of C02, such that burning it all at once increases the amount in the atmosphere noticeably.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|6 years ago|reply
Soil can hold a _lot_ of carbon per square foot. Carbon that is partially lost to the atmosphere when it is plowed.
But my understanding is that tropical forests tend to have fairly carbon poor soils on the forest floor.
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crimsonalucard|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] justanothernoob|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] povertyworld|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvaldes|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gleglegle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Misdicorl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diedyesterday|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] EGreg|6 years ago|reply
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|6 years ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] amriksohata|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gdubs|6 years ago|reply
“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.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] palisade|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|6 years ago|reply
Does the Amazon provide 20% of our oxygen?
is equivalent to
Does the Amazon remove 20% of our waste carbon dioxide?
The main part of the "lungs" of the planet is the phytoplankton in the sea.
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crb002|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squirrelicus|6 years ago|reply
Though i have to admit to bring skeptical of his analysis that suggests the rainforest is a net zero on oxygen production.
[+] [-] d0100|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] m3kw9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diego_moita|6 years ago|reply
But the article totally misses the issue of carbon capture.