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Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

nature.com

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Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#21

Post by RealityVoid »

webreac wrote: post #19
ravenstine wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 launc…

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...

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

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#22

Post by pjc50 »

ravenstine wrote: post #16
civilized wrote: post #8

To anyone who is gearing up to doompost: the abstract says this is likely a negative feedback counteracting warming and carbon rise.

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 launc…

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/

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#23

Post by waserwill »

parksy wrote: post #17
ahevia wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

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…

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.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#24

Post by shoto_io »

parksy wrote: post #13
civilized wrote: post #8

To anyone who is gearing up to doompost: the abstract says this is likely a negative feedback counteracting warming and carbon rise.

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…

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.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#25

Post by ChuckMcM »

parksy wrote: post #13
civilized wrote: post #8

To anyone who is gearing up to doompost: the abstract says this is likely a negative feedback counteracting warming and carbon rise.

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…

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.)

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#26

Post by shawn-butler »

ahevia wrote: post #15
parksy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 ca…

It’s 100% clear that carbon doesn’t persist in the soil. It’s make believe unsupported by any evidence

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#27

Post by billiam »

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.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#28

Post by billiam »

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.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#29

Post by xyzzyz »

ravenstine wrote: post #16
civilized wrote: post #8

To anyone who is gearing up to doompost: the abstract says this is likely a negative feedback counteracting warming and carbon rise.

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 launc…

> 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.

Re: Remote sensing reveals Antarctic green snow algae as important carbon sink

#30

Post by ahevia »

shawn-butler wrote: post #26
ahevia wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

It’s 100% clear that carbon doesn’t persist in the soil. It’s make believe unsupported by any evidence

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.

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